The boy had been in bed an hour and a half when Jane returned to his room after spending time with Jessica and Gavin. In the low lamplight, Travis lay on his side, one loosely fisted hand against his mouth, as if he had fallen asleep while chewing on a knuckle to keep himself awake.
As previously on these rare visits, she settled for the night in an armchair, wrapped in a blanket, watching over him. She slept fitfully, and each time she woke, the sight of him was antidote to the poison of her dreams.
As the tide of sleep, having ebbed, flowed to her once more, she wondered if against all odds she might triumph over David James Michael and his confederacy of elitist sociopaths only to become so ruthless in the process as to lose her humanity and find herself incapable of mothering a child of such perfect innocence.
In the courtroom of dreams, standing before jurors who turned upon her faces as featureless as eggshells, she was convicted of abandoning her son. She fled when a judge sentenced her to a purging of her memory that would erase all awareness of having brought a child into the world. But every door through which she escaped only brought her into the same courtroom, to the same eggshell faces and the same judge and the same cruel judgment.