Eight Months Pregnant I Faced My Husband In Court Until Chaos Broke Out

What Harrison did next was worse than silence. He laughed. It was quiet, barely more than an exhale, but it was unmistakable, and he followed it with a murmured remark to his nearest attorney about instability, about what he had been contending with, about the kind of behavior that courts really ought to take seriously.

Sarah looked down at her hands, still pressed to her stomach. They were trembling. She watched them tremble without particularly wanting to stop them, because they were not trembling from fear.

She was past fear. She was trembling from the specific effort of remaining seated, of not standing up and saying the things she had spent seven years not saying, of staying contained inside the legal process that was, she still believed, the only thing that could actually help her. It was then that she became aware of the judge.