He was so excited and happy.
“Don’t wait up, Gran,” he told me, leaning down to kiss my cheek. “The class is taking pictures by the lake.”
“Be home by midnight,” I said.
That was our final goodbye.
He smiled. “I will. Love you.”
“Love you too, sweetheart,” I whispered, watching him go.
That was the last time I saw him.
The police searched for three weeks.
The lake, the woods, every back road within twenty miles.
Divers went into the water twice.
Search dogs worked the treeline at the edge of the property.
They interviewed Cole’s classmates one by one, and every interview circled back to the same name.
Mason.
He was the last person confirmed to have been with Cole.
He told the officers the same thing every time, in the same flat, hollow voice: they were taking photos, and then Cole was just gone. He didn’t know what happened. He didn’t see anything.
Nobody believed him. Least of all me.
The case went cold four months later. Not closed. Just quietly shelved, the way small-town investigations sometimes are when there’s nothing left to find and no one left to charge.
I drove to the station and sat across from the detective in charge and told him exactly what I thought about that decision. I focused my anger completely.
He didn’t see anything.
He handed me a card with a victim support number on it.
I drove home and put it in the trash.
A year is a long time to carry something with nowhere to put it.
I put it on Mason.
A year is a long time to carry something.
I watched him from across the parking lot at the grocery store. I watched his mother flinch when she saw me coming. I watched him grow from 18 to 19 while Cole stayed frozen at the age he was the last evening I saw him.
I let that unfairness harden into something that felt almost like certainty.
Mason knew. He had to know.
Every time our eyes met across a street or a parking lot, he looked away first. I told myself that was guilt. I needed it to be guilt. I needed there to be a reason, and Mason was the only shape that reason could take.
He had to know.
