Either the guards had been dismissed or someone had decided not to interfere with a grieving man carrying enough rage to light the curtains if he breathed too hard.
I found my mother in the chapel.
She knelt in the first pew, her head bowed, candlelight softening the gold in her hair.For a moment she looked less like a living woman than something painted onto the place—one more beautiful sorrow trapped beneath stained glass and unanswered prayers.
I sat beside her.
Neither of us spoke for a long time.
Finally she said, “He loved you, more than anything.”
The words gutted me.I let out a jagged laugh and bowed my head.
“Not enough to stay.”
She turned so sharply I almost recoiled.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
“Why not?”
“Because that is not what this was.”
I looked at her then.
Her face was wet with tears.Her mouth trembled around truths she was too frightened to say.
“If he did this,” I said, the words scraping me raw, “if he really did this, then why?”
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, there was terror in them.Old terror.Well-practiced terror.The kind built from years of living in captivity.
“You must survive this,” she said.
I stared at the altar ahead of us, at the carved saints with their blank wooden mercy.
“Maybe I don’t want to.”
Her hand found mine and gripped hard.
“Do not let him take both my boys.”
Take.
Not lose.
Take.
The word rang through me like a struck bell.
I turned toward her sharply, but whatever she had almost given me had already disappeared behind fear and silence and all the habits women build to stay alive beside violent men.
I should have pressed her.
I didn’t.
Maybe some part of me already knew the truth and wasn’t ready to hear it in her voice.