The house on Bluebonnet Way was so quiet now. Nancy still prayed, every day, that the time would come when her children forgave her.
Hearing about Frank’s infidelity had shocked Ashley, Jed, and Brianna—even shattered them. If they didn’t know their own father, what did they know? What could they be sure of?
The answer turned out to be simple: The children were sure of Frank’s innocence. They had to be, because the world in which Frank was guilty was a world that no longer made sense.
She was proud of them, even, for being so loyal to their father, as misguided as that loyalty had turned out to be. But she was also conflicted. Wasn’t being on Frank’s side the same as wishing that Nancy, their mother, was dead? That was what Frank had wanted, after all. And though Frank had failed, there was a sense in which he had succeeded. He’d wanted to break Nancy’s family apart, and he’d done that. He’d wanted to take her away from the children, and he had done that too. The way things turned out might not have been the end result Frank was after, but from Nancy’s perspective, it amounted to much the same thing.
It was all so terribly unfair.
Still, Nancy was glad to be alive. She had her faith, and the hatred she did feel for Frank, in her weaker moments, had less to do with his actions in and of themselves than with the ways in which those actions had tested her beliefs. The long nights that had followed the shooting had taken Nancy down some of the darkest paths that she had ever been on. It was the only time in her life that she’d asked Jesus questions and found herself doubting the answers. But she’d come out into the light at the end of that tunnel, and she tried hard not to hate, to forgive, and be grateful for the good things in her life:
Her church. Her faith. The friends who had stuck by her.
The family would recover, she thought. Just as Nancy herself had recovered. God’s grace was infinite, and Nancy prayed more for it now than she ever had before the shooting. If anything, Nancy knew the long trial that she’d gone through had only strengthened her faith. That was just one of the miracles she had been blessed to receive.
Now, in church and at home, Nancy ended her prayers by thanking Jesus for her second chance and by asking God to bring her children home to her.
Then, soberly, she would pray for the salvation of John Frank Howard’s soul.