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Two years after Wayne was shot dead, The Skinner trials began—a media circus’s dream, broadcasted and dissected by millions each week, as if our lives were content to be consumed. For weeks, I sat on the stand, and that felt like reopening every locked door I had spent years learning how to keep shut.

I recounted everything.

Every room.

Every sound.

Every rule.

Every punishment.

Every face I was forced to forget and every body I was forced to remember. I described Wayne’s abuse in such excruciating detail, it made the courtroom go quiet in a way that felt almost physical. I identified his victims when I could, and I helped piece together timelines that had once only existed as fragments in my own survival. And the longer the trial carried on, the more harrowing details came out. Police reports, complaints, calls that had been made over the years about strange activity, or sounds coming from Wayne’s property.

All of them dismissed.

All of them ignored.

Each one was like a fresh layer of hurt, because if just one of them had been taken seriously…if just one officer had gone to that house when someone first reported something was wrong…they would have found him, and they would have stopped him. But they didn’t. Because no one wanted to believe Wayne could do something so heinous.

I remembered sitting there, hands trembling in my lap, thinking about how many names might have never been spoken in that courtroom if someone had simply…knocked on a door. How many lives might have been different. How…Dad could still be here.

Jackson sat in the public gallery every single day.

Never far.

Never out of reach.

Not because I needed him to fight for me in there, but because I needed to know he was still there when I came back out, and I did the same when his time came. I could still remember how he stood at the front of the courtroom with his jaw tight, hands clasped in front of him like he was holding himself together by force alone. How his voice didn’t shake at first, until they asked him to repeat what he’d seen when he first woke up in that basement, and what he thought when he finally realised…it was me.

I remembered how quiet the room went when he spoke.

“I woke up and I thought I was still dreaming,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t understand what I was seeing,” he said, his hands clenched tightly on the stand. “And then I realised she wasn’t a memory,” he continued, his gaze finding mine across the room. “She was there. Standing in front of me. And I remember thinking…I’ve spent seven years grieving her.” He paused. “And she was alive the whole time.”

We had been married for six months by then, and I remembered twisting the gold ring, reminding myself that despite what he’d just revealed, life had continued anyway. That something good had grown out of everything that should have broken me completely. But that wasn’t always so easy to believe.

Especially two years ago, when the film called Tales of The Skinner was released without our consent about our ordeal. It didn’t help that it went on to win four Oscars, and was praised for its “gripping performance of pain and love.”

But it wasn’t real.

Not in the ways that mattered. None of it captured what it was like in that basement. The silence between the screams, the way time stopped making sense, the way survival became the only language left when everything else was taken from you. And none of it told the truth about what it took to get out.

To stay out.

To come back to yourself afterwards.

Jackson had been furious when it came out—all of us were. But I thought part of him hated the idea of our pain being turned into something people clapped for.

So I started writing.

At first, it was impossible; there were too many memories coming back in pieces, and too many moments I had spent years trying to forget. I had to stop often, step away, breathe, wait a few years, and come back when I could. And by the time Elijah was born, I was already onto my first draft. And for the first time, it didn’t feel like I was reopening something that should have stayed buried. It felt like I was finally taking it back.

“I’m trying to do homework in here!” Josie yelled in her cute little voice from her bedroom two doors down. I slapped a hand over my mouth to smother a laugh while Jackson went completely still, his eyes widening like he’d just been caught committing a crime.

“The princess has spoken,” he said gravely, setting our son back on his feet.

Elijah immediately grabbed the drawstring on Jackson’s sweatpants and looked up at him. “Daddy, can we watch Nemo?”

“Finding Nemo?” Jackson scratched the back of his neck. “It’s not out on DVD yet, buddy.”