The people who hurt him believed anger was all I had left.
Maybe that was because anger was the only kind of power they understood.
But anger could not tell me why Christine remained at her father’s house while our son was taken away.
It could not tell me whether Jake had been the target of one explosion or whether something had been building around him before that driveway.
It could not tell me why my old contact reacted to the names the way they did.
Only careful answers could do that.
So I listened.
The voice on the phone began telling me that the people surrounding my family were not a completely blank page to them.
They already knew enough to make me stop thinking of Jake’s attack as an isolated burst of cruelty.
I did not have the full picture yet.
I did not have some neat file explaining every betrayal, and I had no final answer about Christine, her father, Brian, or Scott.
What I had was worse in a different way: the realization that there were questions I had not known to ask until my son ended up in a hospital bed.
I looked at Jake again.
His fingers were still curled into the blanket.
Hours earlier, his grandfather had told him his father was not coming.
Now I was sitting close enough for him to reach me without getting out of bed.
That was where I started.
Not with a threat.
Not with a speech.
Not by proving to Christine’s family that they had underestimated me.
I started with the promise I had made beside my son’s hospital bed and with the one thing the people who hurt him had apparently never expected me to value more than rage: finding out exactly what was true.
And as the familiar voice continued on the other end of that call, I understood that the driveway was not going to be the only thing I needed answers about.
