My name is Joan Wills. I am thirty-seven years old, and I am a judge in the Circuit Court of Jefferson County, Kentucky. I sit on the bench every day wearing a black robe, making decisions that affect the lives of families, children, and people who have been failed by the people who were supposed to love them the most. know what that feels like. I know it because I lived it.Twenty-one years ago, my parents threw me out of their house. I was sixteen years old. I was pregnant. I had nowhere to go, no money, no plan, and no one in the world who seemed to care whether I survived or not.My mother stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, and my father stood behind her with a look on his face I will never forget. It was not anger. It was not even disappointment.It was disgust.Pure, unfiltered disgust aimed at his own daughter, the girl he used to carry on his shoulders at the county fair when she was five.But before I get to that night, before I tell you how I ended up standing in a courtroom with my own parents sitting at the plaintiff’s table staring up at me with shock and horror in their eyes, I need to take you back to the beginning.
I grew up in Hillview, just south of Louisville. My parents, Dale and Connie Wills, cared about reputation more than anything else in this world. More than love. More than loyalty. More than their own flesh and blood.My father worked as a regional sales manager. My mother was a receptionist. From the outside we looked like the perfect American family. From the inside it was a different story.In the hierarchy of the Wills family, I always fell somewhere in the middle. Not the golden firstborn son. Not the adorable baby girl. Just Joan, the one who was easy to overlook. My older brother DJ could do no wrong. My younger sister Tanya was spoiled beyond belief. And I was quiet, a good student, easy to ignore.The only person who ever truly saw me was my grandmother, Lorraine Wills. My father’s mother. She was a retired schoolteacher who had taught fourth grade for thirty-two years, sharp and kind and fiercely independent. Every other weekend, without fail, she would drive up to take me out for lunch. Just me. Not DJ. Not Tanya. Just Joan.She told me once, sitting in a booth at the diner on Main Street, that she took me out alone because I was the one who needed it most. She said she could see a sadness, a loneliness in my eyes.
