The caseworker arrived at eight the next morning with a detective from the county's child protection unit. Nathan was asked to leave the house while they spoke with Grace and me separately — a request, technically, though everyone in the room understood it wasn't optional.
Grace didn't say much to the detective that first day. Mostly she just answered yes-or-no questions with small nods, her eyes moving to me every few seconds to make sure I was still in the room. But it was enough — enough, combined with the two old complaints already sitting in Curtis's file, for the detective to reopen the case formally and list Nathan as a person of interest pending further interviews.
I filed for a temporary protective order that same week. Nathan moved into his brother's old house, ironically, or maybe not ironically at all, while lawyers on both sides worked out what came next. I didn't let myself think too hard about what that said.
It took Grace almost two months in therapy before she said anything close to a full sentence about what those visits had actually looked like. I wasn't in the room for those sessions — her therapist was careful about that, careful about not making Grace perform her trauma for the adults who loved her — but I was in the waiting room every single time, close enough that Grace could see me through the glass whenever she needed to check.
Some nights are still hard. Some nights she still checks that her door isn't locked from the outside, even though it never has been, not once, since she came to live with just me.
But last Tuesday, for the first time since the morning the belt buckle clicked, she fell asleep with her bedroom door open — not because I asked her to, and not because anyone told her it was safe.
She just left it open on her own, and in the morning, that felt like the whole point.