Chapter 15 - The Question I Cannot Answer Yet
A year after the hospital call, Hunter and I drove to Seattle.
Not for a conference.
Just because I wanted to stand in a place where my life split and know that we had survived the half that came after.
We stayed in a different hotel with different carpets and no gold vine patterns. Hunter thought airplanes were amazing. He carried his blue blanket through security like a little king.
On the second night, thunder rolled over the city and he crawled into my bed.
“Mom,” he said sleepily, “do you think monsters know they’re monsters?”
There are questions no six-year-old should ever think to ask.
I brushed his hair back from his forehead.
“Sometimes,” I said. “And sometimes they spend their whole lives pretending they’re not.”
He considered that.
“Grandma pretended.”
“Yes.”
“Aunt Bertha too.”
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a minute.
Then he asked the question I still haven’t fully answered for myself.
“Will you tell me everything when I’m bigger?”
I looked at my son—the child who found a hidden box, named a monster, and survived the secret that broke two generations before him.
“Yes,” I said. “When you’re ready.”
He nodded and drifted back to sleep.
I lay awake listening to the rain against the window and thought about everything the case had changed.
My mother was in prison.
Leonard would die there.
Bertha wrote letters from a treatment unit I hadn’t answered yet.
Hunter was alive, healing, and slowly becoming a child again instead of evidence.
And me?
I was learning that surviving the truth is not the same thing as understanding it.
In the morning, Hunter wanted pancakes and strawberry yogurt. He wore one sock while hopping around the hotel room and made a plastic dinosaur roar at the mirror.
Life, stubborn and absurd, kept moving.
Before we checked out, I stood one last time in the hallway outside our room. The carpet was plain gray. No gold vines. No ghosts attached to it.
Hunter grabbed my hand and said, “Come on, Mom.”
So I went.
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But as the elevator doors closed, one question followed me anyway—the one that matters more than all the courtroom endings and prison sentences:
When my son is finally old enough to hear the full story of what happened in that shed, will telling him the truth set him free—or give the monsters one more place to live?
