How do you do that? Abuse a child for years, directly with your own fist, or indirectly with your blind eye? How do you go about your job having tortured, humiliated, and isolated a child, or knowing that's what was happening in your own home? How do you cause a child's death, directly or indirectly, and go back to your job the next day? Or ever again? How do you get flown up to be on a TV show and affirm your innocence? How do you allow yourself to be put up in a fancy hotel, comment on the softness of the sheets? How do you communicate with your spouse after your fraud incarceration without sobbing at the sight of them, the memory of what you both did? How do you "get your stories straight?" How do you look your father, your biological children in the eye? How do you look yourself in the eye when you look in the mirror without smashing your head into it and praying you bleed out? Just.. HOW?
How is there even a single person alive on earth who's capable of being like this? And how many are still out there, waving to neighbors from their driveway?
I think something in me wanted to believe their innocence, because then this would feel like closure or justice. Now that it's actually set in I don't know how to feel. Possibly the only solace is how many people there are HERE who've been thinking of and trying to help Erica for all these years. Thank you all. <3
