Seeing Blind

Epilogue

Stepping out of the courthouse I inhaled, taking in the cold winter air and letting it rejuvenate me. For as long as I could remember I had hated the cold. But today, after weeks of stress, fear and debate, I could finally breathe freely again. And having the cold nip at my lungs, invigorating me from the inside out, felt somewhat fitting in light of the day.

Harry's hand laced with mine, his eyes down as he led me towards the parking lot.

"So that went well," he commented. It was the first thing he had said since the meeting with the judge moments before. Turning to me he gave me a teasing smirk. "I told you there was nothing to worry about."

I snorted, rolling my eyes at him. "This isn't one of those times where you get to say I told you so, Styles."

His lip stuck out in an adorable pout. "Why not? I don't get to say it very often."

Ignoring his pouting, my eyes fell to the sidewalk, to the snow under my boots, and the sounds of the city around us.

Today had been the day I was dreading since the night everything came crashing down around me. Today, my mother faced a judge, and her fate.

We had endured days of interviews, inquisitions, accusations and meetings, all of which were nothing more than repetitive questions all circling around the same details of the night.

What prompted Reign to show up at my mothers house? Why had I come home? Why had I left in the first place? Why did my mother have a gun? What happened that was the catalyst for her shooting him?

By the end of the third day, I couldn't even form coherent responses to those inane questions any longer. It was like they kept trying to word them differently in the hopes that my answers were change. That I would somehow implicate myself or my mother as being the monsters, rather than the man who left my house in a body bag.

After months of his promises that it would be me leaving that way, it felt somewhat like poetic justice for the tables to be turned.

My mother had been held in jail until todays preliminary hearing. Despite her clean record, the revelation of her drug use and connections with who we now learned was a fairly powerful drug lord in Reigns father, made her a flight risk. It was painful to see her in those drab gray clothes, her face pale and hair limp. She didn't belong in jail for protecting me. She didn't belong in jail for saving my life.

I went to see her every day, sitting with her for as long as the guards would let me. The night I came home, after I learned what she had done, I never wanted to speak to her again. Now, with the unknown looming over us like a giant, I felt like I couldn't get enough time with her to tell her everything I wished I had before.

I learned she had bought the gun the day after I ended up in the hospital at Reigns hands. She didn't plan on ever using it, she said with a look of incomprehension, but something deep inside her told her to have it. She had kept it in a drawer in the kitchen all this time, hidden in a little compartment I never knew existed. When she moved to leave that night, allowing for Reign to think he had won, she had already made her plan. She had already chosen her path.

She wasn't going to lose me again. And even now, when everything was so uncertain, she swore to me she would do it all again if it meant I was safe.

Harry stayed with me in Montana the entire time. Through the days following, over the Christmas holidays which we spent sitting in a little apartment my mothers friend made available for us in light of what had happened. It was a tiny space, with a small double bed and a shower that never seemed to really warm up. But it was safe and comfortable, and allowed me time to wrap my head around everything that had happened. Harry did everything he could to support me, from cooking meals while I sat in a distant distraction, staring out the window, to taking me for walks to look at the Christmas lights in the hopes that it would make me smile. By the time Christmas came around, I was only then starting to feel something that resembled normal.