The number he gave was seventeen. Seventeen times he’d watched his father hurt me, apologize, bring flowers, cry, and then act like nothing had happened. The officer asked him how he knew the cycle would start again, and my son said, “Because it always does.” He wasn’t angry when he said it, and somehow that made it harder to hear. He sounded like a child who had stopped expecting adults to change.
I wanted to tell the officer that this time was different, that his father really was sorry, that we’d talked about getting help. But my son looked at me before I could speak, and I saw something in his face that stopped me. He said, “Mom, you always say that after the flowers.” The officer asked me whether that was true, and for once I didn’t defend my husband. I nodded and said, “Yes, it is.”
That night, my son found me sitting at the kitchen table and put the last bouquet his father had given me in front of me. He said, “You can throw them away now.” I asked him why he’d kept count all these years, and he said, “Because somebody had to remember when you started forgetting.” I cried harder than I had in years, because I finally understood what my son had been watching. He hadn’t been counting apologies — he had been counting the times I chose to believe them.
