I want to take you to a night in the dead of a Wisconsin winter that still lives in my bones.
The wind howls like it’s trying to rip the world apart. Snow falls in thick, relentless sheets—big, wet flakes that sting your face and pile up fast. Temperature’s well below zero, wind chill making it feel like minus 20 or worse. I’m lying in the back of my old pickup truck, the bed lined with cardboard boxes that do nothing against the cold. The topper’s on, but the tailgate window’s cranked open just enough so I can see through it. My breath fogs the air inside, mixing with the metallic smell of gun oil.
In my hands is my .270 Savage—left-hand bolt action, the one I earned working summers with my grandpa. I’d carried that rifle through so many hunts, tracked deer in the same biting cold woods, felt its familiar weight steady my aim. Now it’s pointed toward a house, heavy against my chest, the barrel ice-cold even through my gloves.
Through that open window, I watch burgundy curtains glowing warm from inside. Shadows move behind them—two shapes, close together. My husband and her. The lie screams in my head: ‘If I could just make her disappear, everything will finally be okay.’
Back home, in the 10-by-10 shed behind my in-laws’ house, that’s where I left my world. Crammed wall-to-wall: a king-size bed taking up most of the space, a pack-and-play crib squeezed next to it, a too-big recliner, a dresser with an oversized TV perched on top. Electricity snakes in through an extension cord from the main house—no running water, just an electric heater humming desperately against the cold. I brought my baby home December 20th, right into that frozen shed. He was perfect—blonde hair with this crazy little halo from sitting so long in my pelvis before the C-section, blue eyes, tiny scrunched-up face we called our Benjamin Button baby. Beautiful in every way.
But the hospital stay was hell. My husband came and went, and I knew—he’d already left to sleep with her while I was recovering from surgery, alone with our newborn.
That night I bundled him tight in blankets in the pack-and-play, turned back at the door one last time—his little chest rising and falling peacefully—and closed it. The guilt hit like a punch, but the desperation was louder.
Lying in the truck, anger and hurt swirl into this fuzzy autopilot. For a split second I feel this dark, twisted power—‘I control this. I can end the pain.’ But then the full movie plays, uninvited and vivid: blue and red lights strobing across my vision, blinding flashes that make everything disjointed. The sharp ratchet-click of cuffs locking tight behind my back, metal biting into wrists, cold and unyielding. The back seat of the squad car—vinyl seats sticky and cold, the sharp chemical smell of old coffee, vomit cleaner, and stale cigarette smoke that clings to everything. My shoulders ache from the awkward angle, arms pinned. And worst: my tiny Benjamin Button baby alone, growing up without me, turning into the monster his father was—repeating the chaos, the addiction, the hurt.
