“I don’t know, Connor.” Heather stood in their small den, looking out the front window.
“But he was Jaxon’s friend. He deserves to be at his funeral.”
She gestured out the window at the crowd of reporters in the street. “But they’ll be all over him. It’s bad enough for us, but he’s so fragile.”
Connor slumped in the chair. “Broken, maybe, but fragile? That kid ain’t fragile at all.”
Heather turned away from the window and sighed. She had to bury her youngest son in a day. She had been preparing herself for the funeral for a decade, but it had always been an abstract thought, not a looming event. A week before, she’d had the brief luxury of thinking her youngest was alive, but reality had come crashing down.
Most of the town wanted to turn out to support them. People, total strangers, followed the news stories and were expected to travel from far away. The church service would be small, an event where they could control who entered, but the burial itself would be at the cemetery where anyone could visit. The police expected hundreds, maybe thousands of mourners to line the curb to show their respects.
The intense media pressure had faded for a while but came back with a fierceness when they discovered Jaxon was in fact dead, not alive. And with the revelation of the mysterious boy’s true identity, the coverage had taken on a frenzied pitch. Security officers at the hospital had already caught three reporters trying to sneak up to his room, including a photographer for a tabloid, who was trying for exclusive pictures.
Out in the open of the cemetery, he would be targeted by their long-range lenses. Their presence was too much for her, and she was already trying to protect Connor from it. She had no idea how Theo would handle the pressure. The media would focus on it—The boy who lied—film at eleven—and the gawkers would post their morbid videos of him on YouTube and Facebook.
And wouldn’t they just love to have photos of him sitting with the family?
She had sat in Theo’s room last night, talking about it. He hadn’t argued with her and had accepted her suggestion that he shouldn’t be there, but that bothered her more. He accepted her decision simply because he had never in his life had the permission to say no. He didn’t understand that it was an option to stand up for what he wanted.
She sat down opposite Connor. “The truth is… I don’t have a clue what the right thing to do is. If it was just us and not all of that media horde—”
“Then he would be there with us.”
She folded her hands and stared at them. “Yes.”
“And let’s say that all along he had told us he was Theo. We would still want him to be there to say goodbye, right? Because he was Jaxon’s friend.”
“Yes.”
He leaned forward. “Then that’s the right thing.”
“But don’t we owe it to him to protect him from them?” She waved her hand toward the mob outside.
Connor replied quietly. “For the few nights he was here, I lay in bed at night and listened to him snore. I mean, that kid can really snore like a freaking freight train. I even asked one of the docs about it, and he said it’s probably ’cause that monster broke his nose so many times.”
“I know. I could hear it in my room.”
“For the last two nights, I haven’t had to put up with that snore. You would think I could sleep, but I don’t. It’s too quiet. And it made me wonder how many nights Jaxon fell asleep comforted by that crazy snore, knowing his friend was close.”
Heather wiped away a tear.
Connor sniffled and continued. “The thing is, Jaxon was in Theo’s life for more years than he was in ours. I think it’s only fair he gets to say goodbye like we do. I don’t know how, but I’m going to make sure he can be there.”
Heather stood and glared out the window. “Then let’s figure it out.”