Chapter 5 - Shattered Vows
The next morning, I checked Brody out of the hospital. We didn't return to the house I shared with Philip. Instead, I took the kids to a secure long-stay hotel paid for by my sister, who flew in from Chicago the moment she heard the news.
Three days after Dorothy's arrest, Philip showed up at the hotel lobby. He looked haggard, his eyes bloodshot, his clothes wrinkled. He looked like a man whose entire reality had collapsed around him.
I agreed to meet him in the hotel courtyard while my sister stayed upstairs with Skylar and Brody.
"Jenna, please," Philip choked out as soon as I sat across from him at a concrete table. "You have to listen to me. I swear on my life, I didn't know she put Brody in that trunk. I thought... I thought Mom was just hiding him at a hotel to prove you were an unfit mother! She told me you were having a nervous breakdown!"
"And you believed her?" I said, my voice dead calm. "Philip, we have been married for eleven years. I bore your children. I stood by you when your father died. And the moment your mother pointed a finger at me, you fed me to the wolves."
"She pulled me aside at the party," Philip wept, rubbing his face with his trembling hands. "She said she saw you walking Brody to the lake. She was so convincing, Jenna! She was my mother! I've spent my whole life trusting her!"
"That is your tragedy, Philip, not mine," I said standing up. "You were willing to let me go to prison for the rest of my life for a crime I didn't commit, just because your mother told you to."
"Jenna, don't do this! We can fix this! We can go to therapy! My mother is in jail—she can't hurt us anymore!" he begged, reaching out to catch my wrist.
I pulled my hand back sharply. "Do not touch me."
"What about the kids?" he pleaded, tears streaming down his face. "They need their father!"
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"They needed a father who would protect them from a monster," I said, leaning down so I was eye-to-eye with him. "Instead, their father helped the monster lock their brother in a trunk. You will communicate with me only through my attorney from now on."
I turned my back on him and walked toward the hotel elevator. As the doors slid shut, I saw him drop to his knees on the pavement, sobbing uncontrollably. For the first time in years, I didn't feel the urge to comfort him. I felt nothing at all.
