Chapter 11 - Ben
Ben was eighteen now. When he walked into that garage, I stared at him longer than I meant to. For six years I had counted the children who never came home. Standing in front of me was one who did.
He barely remembered Grant's face. But he remembered the shouting. "Both arms." That was enough.
The final hours of my sons' lives had always existed only in my imagination — cold water, fear, panic, nothing else. Now one small piece of it held something different.
Their voices. Their habits. Them.
That evening, Naomi and I went back to the bedrooms. Donation boxes still covered the floor. She touched one. "Should we put everything back?"
May you like
I looked around. For six years I'd kept their things because some part of me believed that moving them meant moving away from the people who'd owned them. I finally understood it differently.
"No," I said. "We started. We finish."
