Part Eight: What Came After
The trial was fourteen months later. He did not attend most of it — there was no reason for him to be there during the procedural parts, and Emma did not need to testify in person, which the court had arranged carefully. Marcus Webb pleaded not guilty, which meant it went further than it might have, and was then convicted on all counts. The sentence was three years.
Claire pleaded guilty to neglect. Her sentence was suspended, with conditions. He had his views on this and kept them to himself, because what mattered to Emma was not the length of numbers but the permanence of her own safety, which had been established and which he tended daily.
He had thought, in those first weeks, that his anger would require somewhere to go — that the pressure of it would need an outlet, a confrontation, something. He had planned, in a distant way, to pursue every legal avenue available, to ensure that what had happened was named and recorded and could not be quietly absorbed into the ordinary flow of things.
He did pursue those avenues. He pursued them carefully, with the help of a solicitor who specialized in family and criminal law and who had described the case, in the understated way of solicitors, as clear-cut. He gave his statements and he attended the required appointments and he cooperated fully with everything that was asked of him, and the process moved at the pace processes moved.
But the anger, he found, did not have the consuming quality he had expected. It was there — it was there, it did not go anywhere, he did not expect it to — but it existed alongside other things now. Alongside the Tuesday conversation about bird surnames, and Geoffrey’s unlikely affection, and the way Emma had started, in the past month, to run again when she came down the stairs in the morning, which she had not done in the first weeks, which she had moved carefully and quietly instead, and the return of the running was a thing he noticed every morning with a specific wordless gratitude.
The anger was not the biggest thing. That was what he had not expected.
