He had tried to tell us the truth the only afternoon it would have mattered, and no one could hear a thing he wasn’t able to say.
So he stopped saying anything.
For eight years, my son was not broken by grief.
He was silenced by a secret too big for a child to hold and too dangerous for a child to speak.
The clues had been there the whole time, if I’d known how to read them.
The drawings Jeremy made in therapy, year after year — always two children, never one in a coffin.
The way he’d point, on long drives, in the same direction every time we passed water.
The way he flinched, every single anniversary, the moment his father walked through the door.
He wasn’t mourning his sister.
He was watching her killer sit down to dinner.
Except Janice had never been killed at all.
Chapter 3: What Jeremy Saw
