“What do you want me to do with them?”
“Keep them.”
She placed the shoes inside a larger box beside a photograph of Rebecca smiling beside Lake Michigan.
Then she looked at her son and finally spoke the words she should have given him five years earlier.
“You were never responsible for surviving.”
Noah closed his eyes.
“The accident was not your fault,” Evelyn continued. “Rebecca’s death was not your fault. You were a fourteen-year-old child who survived something terrible.”
He did not embrace her.
He did not say that he forgave her.
But he did not pull away when Evelyn took his hand.
Daniel watched from the doorway.
Perhaps the marriage could not be repaired.
Perhaps it could, although not in the way Evelyn hoped.
Emotional justice does not always mean recovering what has been lost.
