On Mason’s birthday a year later, I stood by the ocean in Grayhaven and placed a lantern with his name on it, and I whispered, “I could not save you, but I can make sure the truth about you lives on.”
As I walked away, my phone buzzed with a message from another mother asking for help reviewing her child’s records, and I replied, “Start with the original logs and never accept summaries, because the truth is always there if you look hard enough.”
For the first time since everything shattered, I felt like I was not walking out of grief, but out of the lie that had kept me trapped for so long.
