He nodded.
“You don’t get to climb into my family,” I said quietly. “You don’t get to hand my child secrets and call it comfort.”
The officers promised a no-contact order. I demanded he be banned from school property and that security protocols change.
When Noah came back into the room, clutching a small plastic dinosaur the man had given him, I knelt in front of him.
“That man is not Ethan,” I said softly.
Noah’s lip trembled. “But he said—”
“He said something untrue. Grown-ups don’t put their sadness on children. And they don’t ask kids to keep secrets.”
Noah started to cry. I held him until he calmed.
At home that night, Mark shook with anger and guilt.
“I should’ve been the one,” he whispered. “Not Ethan.”
“Don’t,” I said. “We still have Noah. We don’t get to drown.”
Two days later, I went to the cemetery alone.
I placed daisies at Ethan’s stone and pressed my palm against the cold granite.
“I’m done letting strangers speak for you,” I whispered. “No more secrets. No more borrowed words.”
The grief was still there. It always would be.
But now it was clean—no confusion, no manipulation, no borrowed ghosts.
Just truth.
And I could carry that.
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