But she did slow—just slightly—when she reached it. She did not plan to; her feet just did it on their own.
She stopped at the entrance to the parking area and stood there for a moment in the early morning light. The same chain-link fence, the same cracked asphalt, the same narrow corridor between the fence line and the back of her block where two cruisers had once parked nose to nose to block her path.
Empty now. Completely, ordinarily empty. No cruisers, no uniforms, no one standing between her and the way home.
She looked at it. She breathed.
She thought about Finn on the porch with his tablet held steady. She thought about Marcus's single-word text in a fourth-grade classroom. She thought about a courtroom she had chosen not to sit in, and a verdict she had found out about from a plastic chair while her son talked about history. She thought about Derek: "You handled it, Jade. Now let the rest take care of itself."
She exhaled. Then she ran through it.
The kitchen light was on when she came through the back door. Finn was at the table in his pajamas, a bowl of cereal in front of him, his hair pressed flat on one side from sleep; he had clearly been awake for a short time. Zeus and Ares moved past her immediately and repositioned themselves at his feet with practiced precision, angling hopefully for anything that might fall from the bowl.
He looked up when she came in. "Good run?" he asked.
She was still catching her breath. She crossed the kitchen, pulled out the chair across from him, and sat down. The morning light came through the window above the sink and fell across the table in a long, warm rectangle: across the cereal bowl, and the legal pad she had left there the night before, and the photograph of Derek she kept on the windowsill—his face caught mid-laugh in a moment so ordinary it hurt sometimes to look at.
She looked at it now and did not look away. Then she looked at her son.
"Good run," she said.
Finn nodded, satisfied, and went back to his cereal. Zeus exhaled deeply at his feet; Ares did the same. The house was warm and quiet and full of everything she had fought for.
She was exactly where she was supposed to be.