My mother-in-law held a steaming hot iron inches from my 8-month pregnant belly. “Sign the custody papers, or you both burn,” she smirked, laughing as she dropped a forged military casualty notice of my husband’s death onto the kitchen table. I sat trembling in the chair, my vision blurring from terror—until the back door violently slammed open. Standing in the doorway, caked in the pale dust of a foreign deployment, was my “dead” Army Captain husband. He didn’t yell. He didn’t lose his temper. He calmly reached for his phone, looked his mother dead in the eye, and said: “Officer, dispatch police to my address. I’d like to report an attempted mu//rder.”

Chapter 3: The Yellow Room

Two agonizing weeks later, the doctors finally released me, and Jack drove us back to the house.

But it didn’t feel like the same house.

The air inside felt incredibly heavy. The kitchen tile still bore the ugly, black scorch mark from the iron. The nursery upstairs smelled faintly of the pungent lavender sachets Eleanor had stuffed into the drawers without my permission. The heavy velvet curtains were still drawn tight, blocking out the Georgia sun. It was a mausoleum of my trauma.

I stood paralyzed in the entryway, my hands shaking uncontrollably.

Jack watched me with careful, assessing eyes. “We don’t have to stay here, Emily. I can put it on the market tomorrow. We can rent an apartment until we relocate.”

I looked at him, then at the stairs leading up to Lily’s room. “This is our home, Jack.”

“It can be sold.”

“It can also be taken back.”

A slow, proud smile touched his lips. “Then we take it back.”

We started the exorcism in the kitchen.

Jack refused to hire a contractor. He knelt on the floor with a hammer and a heavy steel chisel, working slowly, violently, and deliberately until the burnt tile was completely pulverized into dust. I sat nearby in a folding chair, methodically sorting through a mountain of baby clothes, watching the ugly black scar of my terror disappear piece by piece.

When he finished, he held up a jagged shard of the ruined tile. “Do you want to keep a piece?”

I stared at it, feeling the phantom heat against my belly. “Throw it in the trash.”

He did. The sound of it hitting the bottom of the metal bin felt like a victory bell.

Next, we moved through the house, ripping open every velvet curtain and unlocking the windows to let the humid, salty coastal air flush out the stagnation. We aggressively changed every single lock on the doors.

Then, we marched upstairs and repainted the nursery. We didn’t keep Eleanor’s oppressive, sterile beige. We painted it a warm, blindingly bright, defiant yellow—the exact color of the morning sun.

Chloe came over carrying three large pizzas and an arsenal of paint rollers. My mother, who had flown in from Chicago, meticulously sanitized the baby bottles. And surprisingly, Arthur arrived quietly at the back door with a heavy toolbox, asking softly where he could be of use.

I hesitated when I saw him, the instinct to hide flaring up, but Jack did not speak for me. He waited for my command.

Arthur stood awkwardly near the threshold. “Emily… I am not here to ask for your forgiveness. I know I haven’t earned it. I am simply asking for permission to repair something in this house that needs repairing.”

I looked at his calloused hands. “The crib is incredibly loose.”

Arthur nodded, his eyes shining. “I can fix that.”

And he did. He spent three hours reinforcing the mahogany crib, sanding down a rough corner, and perfectly balancing the rocking chair. When he finished, he packed his tools and left through the back door without expecting an invitation to dinner. That was the very first thing Arthur Mercer did correctly in my presence.

A month before my actual due date, the Savannah criminal court convened.