My son sobbed the entire drive to his grandmother’s house. “Daddy, please don’t leave me here.” My wife snapped, “You’re babying him.” I left him anyway. Three hours later, a neighbor called. “Your little boy ran to my house shaking. He’s hiding under my bed and won’t stop crying.”

About ten minutes into the drive, Owen said, “Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“I want to tell you something, but I don’t know if it sounds weird.”

“Try me.”

Owen watched the dark road ahead. “I’m glad everything happened the way it did.”

William’s hands tightened on the wheel. “What do you mean?”

“I mean…” Owen searched. “I hate that they hurt me. I hate it. And I wish they never had. But if it didn’t happen that way, maybe nobody would’ve ever found out. Maybe Sue would’ve kept hurting kids. Maybe you wouldn’t have written the book. Maybe Tabitha and the other people wouldn’t have told the truth.” He shrugged one shoulder. “So I guess something good came out of something bad.”

William had to blink several times before the road steadied again. He pulled over onto the shoulder under a streetlight because his eyes had gone too blurred to drive safely.

He turned to his son.

Owen looked back with that same old seriousness, older now, wiser, but still fundamentally the boy who had once crawled out from under a stranger’s bed covered in blood and trusted his father to hold the world shut against monsters.

“You are not supposed to have to make meaning out of pain at twelve years old,” William said, voice rough.