Not in some dramatic movie way. She still went to school, still did her homework, still remembered to feed Mrs. Peaches, our aging orange cat. But the music went out of her. She stopped humming while she brushed her teeth. She stopped narrating elaborate adventures for her stuffed animals in the backseat. She no longer ran to the window when the ice cream truck came down the street. Her teachers wrote kind little notes about her seeming distracted. She began chewing the sleeves of her sweaters until the cuffs frayed.
At bedtime she asked questions that pierced me with their precision.
“Do judges know who tells the truth?”
“Can dads decide not to be dads anymore?”
“If somebody lies in court, does God get mad?”
“Would you still find me if I had to sleep somewhere else?”
I answered as carefully as I could, my own terror locked under my ribs like something radioactive. “Judges try to know the truth.” “Dads don’t stop being dads, even when they act wrong.” “Yes, I think God cares about lies.” “I would always find you. Always.”
The last one I said without hesitation because there are promises mothers make from a place deeper than certainty.
One night, about three weeks before the hearing, she sat cross-legged on the living room rug with her tablet propped against the coffee table. I had bought the tablet used the year before for educational games and drawing apps. It came in a thick purple case with rubbery handles and a cracked corner I could never quite clean. She loved it because it was hers, a small portal to cartoons and coloring pages and the occasional dance video she tried to imitate in the hallway.
She looked up at me while I folded laundry on the couch.
“Mommy, if the judge asks me a question, can I answer honestly?”
I smiled tiredly. “Of course.”
Her gaze stayed on my face. “Even if the answer makes somebody mad?”
“Yes,” I said. “Especially then.”
She nodded slowly and returned to the screen.
At the time I thought it was another child’s abstract anxiety, like asking whether thunder could come through windows or whether her teacher had a life when school ended. I didn’t see the carefulness in her expression. I didn’t notice the way she had begun carrying that tablet more often, tucking it into her backpack even on days when she didn’t ask to use it.
I was too busy surviving my own unraveling.