Page 108 of Cruel Kiss

They're lowering the casket when it happens.

I've got Hayden back at my side by then, and Isabella. The straps groan under the weight of it, the funeral men working the mechanism, and Todd's mother sobs. The little crowd stands in its clusters and watches and murmurs. I feel the whispers pointing at the man by the treeline like fingers.

And then my son lets go of my hand.

I feel it before I understand it. Nine years old, in the little gray suit I bought him for his cousin's christening two years ago, sleeves already too short. He steps out from under the tent. I say his name, but he doesn't stop.

He walks across the grass. Straight across the open space between the grave and the trees, in front of all of them, in front of the woman in navy and the whispering man and Todd's crying mother and the funeral director and Gia Mercer standing by the mausoleum, and every single one of them watches him go, because a small boy crossing a graveyard can make a whole crowd go quiet.

He walks all the way to Ronan.

And he takes his hand.

I watch Ronan look down.

Hayden doesn't say anything. He just holds on. Standing next to Ronan at the edge of it all, both of them facing the grave, my son making a decision in front of every watching eye about who is his and who is not, about which of the two men in his life he's choosing to stand beside.

The whispers don't stop. But they change.

I hear it. The shape of it shifts, from certainty into something less sure, because it's one thing to declare that a man is a murderer and another to watch a nine-year-old cross a field to hold his hand at his own father's funeral.

Ronan wraps his big hand all the way around Hayden's small one. He doesn't say anything, either. He just stands there and lets my son claim him in front of the whole cruel world.

I have to look away or I'm going to lose it, and I promised myself I wouldn't.

Isabella tugs my skirt. "Mommy," she whispers. "Now?"

The casket has settled at the bottom. The straps come free. In a minute, the men will start to fill it in. I don't want her to lose her chance, so I nod and walk her to the edge of the hole. I hold her hand while she looks down.

She's not scared. Six years old and she looks down into her father's grave like it's just a thing that's happened, just like children do.

Then she holds out her drawing.

She lets me see it, finally. It's Todd. I can tell because she wrote DADDY across the top in her careful backwards letters. She gave him the yellow hair and the big square shoulders. He's standing next to a stick figure with brown hair that's her, holding her hand. And behind them, small, in the corner, she's drawn a caterpillar in a box.

And above Todd's head, floating, she's drawn a butterfly.

"So he knows," she says, very seriously, "that he gets to turn into something better."

I can't hold it after that. But she's watching me, so I make myself cling on, because if I go to pieces then she thinks this is a thing to go to pieces about, and I want her to think otherwise.

This is a time where you make a drawing and you let it go.

She leans over the edge, careful, and she lets the paper fall.

It drifts. It catches the air, tips and slides, then lands on the top of the casket, the butterfly facing up.

"Bye, Daddy," Isabella says.

Across the grass, my son holds a killer's hand that never held the knife.

At the treeline, the man I chose against every receipt I own holds it back.

And down in the ground, on top of a box that holds a man who did terrible things and loved his children anyway, a little girl's butterfly waits to be covered over.

I hold Isabella's hand, and I let the whole watching world see exactly who all of us belong to.

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