He didn’t look like a boy who’d been out having fun.
He looked like a man who’d been working himself into the ground.
All my anger vanished. I grabbed the doorframe as my knees buckled.
“Oh God, Nathan,” I whispered. “What have you done? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
Chapter 2: What a Mother Doesn’t See
To understand what my son had done, you have to understand what I thought I’d hidden from him.
Nathan’s father, Dan, died two years ago.
We’d bought our house in Brindle Falls when Nathan was a baby, and it held every good year we ever had — Dan’s height marks on the kitchen doorframe, the porch he built, the tree the two of them planted.
After Dan died, I held it together on the outside and came apart on the inside of the bank statements.
I was behind on the mortgage. Months behind. The kind of behind that comes with letters you stop opening and phone calls you take in the car so your son won’t hear.
