JACK
The road before me, the trip in this car. Both felt unending.
Sage in the back seat, a modwrog.
Beckett in the seat next to me, barely holding it together.
Watching Mom deteriorate had been the worst thing I’d faced in my entire three-year-old world. Her body got thinner and thinner, her skin yellowed. The smell of sickness replaced the familiar sweet scent of her skin. Bed bound. Unable to move. Groaning with each breath she took in the last hours of her life.
I didn’t want to watch this happen to someone else I loved.
I didn’t want to watch Beckett watching it, either.
Last time was bad enough—the way he’d clung to Mom, the way he’d cried, the way Mom had been too weak and too drugged to respond to him at all.
The one reprieve back then, back fifteen years ago, lay in the fact that Beckett remembered none of it.
He didn’t remember how he acted. He didn’t remember what it was like to watch our mother waste away.
This time, he would remember it all.