NICK
Mason is finally asleep.
It took forty minutes. He cried for the first twenty not loud, not the thrashing kind, just the kind that a five-year-old does when he’s too tired to sob but too upset to stop. He asked me three times if Mia was really his sister. I said yes three times. On the third one he nodded and said, “Good, because I promised to protect her from spiders and I don’t break promises,” and then he rolled over and fell asleep with his fist curled around the corner of his pillow.
I sit on the edge of his bed for a while after. Listening to him breathe. Thinking about how my five-year-old son screamed at his own mother to stop being cruel, and how my ex-wife flinched at the volume but not the words.
*It’s a good thing you were saved.*
I close Mason’s door. Walk to the kit
