I didn’t know if you’d believe me either, Alexander.
When you walked in and your mother was screaming — I’d stopped hoping. I looked up at you and I thought, he’s going to believe them too. Everyone always believes them.
And then you put your jacket on me.”
“I will always put my jacket on you,” I said. “For the rest of my life. Before I ask a single question. That’s what believing you means.”
PART 5 — FINAL
That was three years ago.
Clara’s hair is long again. Almost to her waist, the way it was. She wears the hair clip I brought her nearly every day — the one I bought for a wife I didn’t know had been brutalized, that waited on a nightstand while she healed, that means more to both of us now than anything expensive ever could.
