Chapter 6 - What Bertha Finally Said
Bertha asked to speak with me alone.
Richards didn’t like it, but he allowed it in an interview room with the camera running and a female detective just outside the door. I wasn’t there as a witness. I was there as her sister.
Bertha looked awful.
Not guilty—awful.
She had the hollow, sleepless face of someone whose inner life had finally started collapsing under the weight of what she’d done.
“Mom says you’re overreacting,” she began.
“Hunter nearly died.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t use that tone with me.”
She stared at the table for a long time.
“We were supposed to scare him,” she said at last.
Every muscle in my body locked.
“What?”
“Leonard said he just wanted to scare him so he’d stop snooping in the shed.”
“Leonard,” I repeated. “Not some random man. Leonard.”
Bertha nodded.
The world became very quiet.
She then told me my mother had reconnected with Leonard last year after finding him through a church charity program. He was broke, drifting, and sleeping in his truck. My mother let him “do repairs” around the property.
Then she let him use the shed.
“Why?” I asked.
Bertha’s eyes flicked up to mine.
“Because she never stopped loving him.”
I laughed once, a sound that wasn’t laughter.
“He hurt us.”
Bertha looked down again.
“He mostly hurt you.”
The room tilted.
“What does that mean?”
She swallowed hard.
“Mom always said you were dramatic. She said you got ideas in your head. She said Leonard only disciplined you because you lied.”
There it was—the family language I had been raised inside, laid bare in one sentence.
Not truth.
Doctrine.
“And Hunter?” I asked.
“He found the box and started asking questions,” Bertha said. “Leonard got angry. Mom said if you found out, everything would come back.”
“What is ‘everything’?”
Bertha started crying then, but even her crying made me furious.
“I don’t know all of it,” she whispered. “I just know Mom was terrified you’d remember.”
I stood so fast the chair legs screamed across the floor.
“My son is in intensive care because you let the man who abused children take him into a locked shed.”
Bertha flinched like I’d struck her.
“I know.”
“And you said he deserved it.”
Her face twisted.
“Because if he was just bad, then maybe we weren’t what happened to us.”
I stopped.
It was the first honest thing she’d said.
Also the ugliest.
Before I left the room, I turned back once.
“Did Leonard ever hurt you?”
Bertha looked so small then I almost hated myself for asking.
“Not like he hurt you,” she said.
That answer followed me all the way back to the ICU.
May you like
Because it meant Bertha had not only known.
She had built her whole mind around surviving it.
