It didn’t feel like a Wednesday. All of these irreversible events had taken place in just… two days? That couldn’t be possible. At this point, I was overthinking every minute thing just because of the trauma I had faced in the few days prior. I moved past that, though. I had to focus on what to do next. My brother, the only person I thought I could trust, betrayed me. Not only did he betray me, but he had been lying to me for almost a century. To add to it, my own wife was in on it too. I sat in my desolate apartment kitchen, devoid of any furniture or memorabilia, just the week’s groceries that hadn’t been eaten yet. I sat there, silent, for a few hours almost waiting for some sort of heavenly deliverance from God himself. I wanted Him to reach down to me and grab my shoulder and explain to me that all of this was one big April Fool’s joke that Him and his devilish angels were playing on me to get back at me for saying “goddammit” when I stubbed my pinky toe on the edge of that black glass Ikea side table my stepmother bought me for my birthday a few years back. But that didn’t happen.

Instead, I packed up the rest of my things in the van and said my last goodbyes to that horrid, one bedroom hellhole in downtown Portland. My goodbyes weren’t much though, considering that apartment was where I had experienced the most emotional pain at one point in time in my whole life; also known as somewhere between nine and ten o'clock last night. Pat was waiting for me outside. I put the two duffel bags in his strangely spacious trunk and wrapped around the front to the passenger side door. Pat was ecstatic, as always. It’s always so weird to wonder how people can remain so happy in the worst of times. Maybe he didn’t care because it didn’t directly affect him. We talked for a while, and he let me know that Karen was granted full custody of the kids. For some reason, this didn’t surprise me much, but I cried anyway. I cried a lot. Pat comforted me as much as he could, rubbing my shoulder and trying his best to cheer me up with his neverending grin while I put on a superficial smile to get him to keep driving.

When we arrived at the courthouse, a wave of dread came over me like that one big wave that always washes away the sandcastles at the end of the day. Whether it was dread from the fear of the final verdict, or just overall dread for the life that I knew I would be sure to live for as long as my neck lets me. They seated me in a spot that made it almost impossible for me to see Karen and the kids, but that was fine. The trial was alarmingly short, and that was fine too. I didn’t expect anything more. My eyes were welded to a spot on the wall where it seemed the painters had forgotten to go over a second time, because it was significantly lighter than the rest of the wall, almost like there had been an object thrown through the wall and it needed to be repainted. Life sentence. They escorted me through the doors at the back of the courtroom and out to some array of police vehicles, and that was it. There wasn’t much on my mind after that. No emotional rollercoasters or however they explain it in the movies. I felt content. Pat would visit me a few times a month, but that sputtered out and ended after a while, and that was fine. I had no real remorse for what I had done on July eleventh, but I had a vague understanding of the impact it had on people I cared about. Nevertheless, my brother was dead, and nothing really mattered past that point. I venerated myself for doing what I needed to do, and I could live happily knowing that his presence was no longer on this earth, and I could finally forgive him for what he had done.