Page 124 of Running Home to You
Kate chewed her lip. Ryan had asked her the same question a thousand times, and while she threw out summer or the coming fall, she leaned on the trial’s end as a caveat.
“Listen, I know this isn’t your favorite topic, but have you heard from Cruz?” Mick’s voice cracked.
“No. Why?” Kate hadn’t reached out to Mick or Jill or T.K. about the letter. Not about Abby’s arrest or rehab either. It didn’t feel like her place. She prepared to sound surprised when Mick shared the updates.
“Uh.” Mick huffed into the phone. “We got in a big fight.”
Her mouth fell. “Oh. About what?”
She sniffled. “It doesn’t matter. I just. I don’t know if she’s mad at me still or if I should call her. I just feel bad.”
“You should call her.” Kate’s hand went to her chest, rubbing ather heart. It hurt for Mick, hurt for Abby, and hurt even more that she couldn’t fix it. “I’m sure she’s forgiven you for whatever happened. You two are so close.”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t good.”
“She seemed to have a lot on her mind at the wedding,” Kate said. “Maybe she’s feeling better now.”
“Yeah. What happened between you two, anyway?”
Kate swiped the softball from the clutter and squeezed. “I really don’t want to talk about it. I prefer not to talk about her at all, if that’s okay.”
“Yeah, of course. Of course, Hutch. I’m sorry.” Mick changed back to her jovial, upbeat tone. “You know, I’m planning an alumni game at Insley. You should come. Shupe can’t because of the new baby, but T.K. said she will. Seaborn, Palamino, and Brookheimer too. I invited everyone.”
Kate shook her head, defaulting to her well-worn excuse. “I’m sorry. I can’t with the case and everything else.”
“Right. Well, let me know if you change your mind.”
But as she hung up, she wondered if Abby would be there. She reread her letter, searching for her between commas and lines. She contemplated writing back, pen hovering above a blank sheet on her legal pad before pushing it aside.
Kate hunkered down for the last weeks of the trial. She was getting better at answering the reporters and quipping back at the defense. She held her chin higher, her breathing came steadier, like that sweet spot on the field, certain of the next move.
“And how did it make you feel when the school shut down the LGBTQ alliance club?” Kate asked the student on the stand. She didn’t particularly like having the kids testify, wishing to protect them from every question, aching when their voices shook as they tried to sit tall.
“Like I had to hide who I was. Like I had this secret that I shouldn’t share at school. No one told me I couldn’t, but I just felt it.”
“Objection. Subjective,” the defense said.
“Your honor, testimony goes to show the impact the school’s discrimination had on their psychological and emotional state, as well as their ability to learn.”
The judge nodded at her. “Overruled. You may continue.”
Kate stepped closer to the teen, who sat wide-eyed and mute, and placed a hand on the wood railing. “Go ahead,” she said. “How did it make you feel?”
“That I was less-than. That something about me, something I couldn’t change, was wrong and shouldn’t be shared.”
Kate paused to let the answer sink in for the judge, for the defense, for all those watching in the galley. But the brief moment she turned away in the quiet, pretending to fiddle with notes on the counsel’s table before she asked the next question, was because of the hole in her chest, widening, deepening, never closed. A sharp pain shot through her shoulder, but she turned back around, cleared her throat, and carried on.
But it stuck with her. It stuck with her as she hovered over another pre-marriage counseling assignment. A letter to her future children. Another one she couldn’t write. All trial long, she’d stepped into herself, and that night, when Ryan came to pick her up, she didn’t step back out.
“I don’t want to go anymore,” she said. The testimony, the letters she still hadn’t written, to Abby and to her nonexistent children, swirled inside.
Ryan’s eyes narrowed as he walked into the apartment. “Why? We have to.”
“No, we don’t,” Kate said, steeling herself to tell the truth, at least the part of it she knew for certain. “I can’t raise my kids in a church like that. In a place where they might feel the need to hide who they are.”
“We’ve been going for years now, and suddenly you act like this is new.” He stared at her for a beat. “Why do you go if you don’t agree with it?”
“Because it’s what I’ve always known. Because I thought it was good. But I started working on this case and—”
