Noah shook his head slowly. “The man said Ethan was mad at Dad. That’s why Ethan didn’t come home. He said if I was a good boy and kept the secret, Ethan wouldn’t be mad at me too.”
The air left my lungs. The driver hadn’t just been offering comfort; he had been sowing seeds of guilt to deflect his own. He had made a five-year-old believe that a car accident was a matter of temperament—that death was a punishment for being “bad.”
I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I walked into the living room where Mark was sitting in the dark, staring at a blank TV screen.
“We’re leaving, Mark,” I said.
He blinked, confused. “What? Where?”
“This house. This city. This grief.” I sat down across from him, my voice trembling but certain. “That man didn’t just kill Ethan. He poisoned Noah’s memory of him. And we’ve let this silence grow so loud that a stranger was able to fill it with lies. We are losing the son we have left because we’re too busy haunting the one we lost.”
Mark looked away, his jaw tight. “I can’t just leave him here, Elana. The cemetery—”
“Ethan isn’t at the cemetery, Mark! Noah told us that months ago, and we didn’t listen! He’s in the way you used to laugh. He’s in the way Noah kicks a ball. But he’s not in that sinkhole of a school or that man’s twisted apologies.”
