“Thank you,” Waylon says, handing it back over the table. I can’t help but notice now how painfully little there is; how quickly he was able to scan through it. Because that’s all of it, right there in his hand. That’s everything they’ve got—or, at least, everything they’ll share with us—wedged between two cardboard flaps, thin enough to fit in a purse.
“Keep it,” I say. “I have my own copy.”
“Would you mind if I reached out to some of these people?” he asks, tapping the edge of the folder before slipping it into his briefcase. “To interview? Friends, family, Ben—”
“My family is off-limits,” I interrupt. “Please don’t bother them.”
“Fine,” he says. “Fair enough.”
“Friends are fine,” I say, even though I don’t have many of those anymore. “Neighbors are fine. Ben…”
I stop, wondering how to word this delicately. I reach for the mug before me, even though it’s empty, my fingers worrying their way around the edge.
“Ben isn’t going to cooperate,” I say at last. “And honestly, he won’t be happy I’m doing this, so I would appreciate it if you didn’t reach out to him. Or at the very least, save him for last. Give him less time to try and talk me out of it.”
“Okay,” he says. “But, you know, you’re both his parents. It would seem a little one-sided if you were the only one who participated.”
“I know. I know how it looks.”
“It looks bad. It looks like, you know, like he doesn’t want to help.”
“And people say it looks like I’m exploiting my missing son for fame,” I say. “So I’ve just learned not to care what people think it looks like. Everyone grieves in different ways.”
I’m reminded again of that dockhand back in Beaufort; his watery eyes as we watched that dolphin pushing her dead baby around the harbor with her nose.
“That must have been hard,” Waylon says, shifting gears. “You two, trying to deal with this together … but, you know, on your own.”
I look up at him, that simple explanation tearing a hole through my chest. Because that’s exactly what it felt like: the two of us, together, but also completely alone.
“Yeah,” I say, my fingers hovering over Ben’s ring, still tucked discreetly beneath my shirt. “We just handled it differently, you know? I had a hard time sleeping. I had a hard time doing anything, really. All I wanted to do was be involved in the case, in every little detail. And Ben … well, I don’t know.”
I force myself to swallow, take a deep breath. I can feel my eyes tightening; the blood vessels squeezing.
“He thinks I could be doing more harm than good, going out on my own like this. And he isn’t alone, either. Other people think that, too.”
I think about Detective Dozier; the disapproval in his tone as he mentioned my keynote—no, my performance.
“The detectives told us after a couple months that Mason probably wouldn’t be found alive,” I continue. “That, statistically speaking, they were more likely to find … remains, probably.”
Waylon is silent, an apology in his eyes.
“They advised we try to find a way to make peace with it, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t give up like that.”
“I don’t think anyone should expect you to.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t think so, either. But Ben wanted to try, you know. Try to make peace with it. Not move on from Mason, obviously, but move forward. He tried to throw us into therapy, grief-counseling groups, and I just wasn’t ready for that. I made it pretty hard for him.”
Waylon nods, glancing at the collage of pictures on the wall: my entire home a persistent and painful reminder of everything that was taken from us. Everything we lost.
“When did you start doing that?” he asks, gesturing to it.
“A few weeks after he was taken, I guess. When the official investigation started to slow down.”
I remember feeling surprised at how easy it was for everyone around me to move on. The first talk I gave was in a high school gymnasium, just days after the news had broken. Ben and I had set up the chairs ourselves, a couple dozen metal folding ones organized in rows, and it had been packed—the entire city showed up, bodies crammed tight as they leaned against the tumbling mats, leeching on to my every word. They were willing to do anything to help, anything, but when I held another one a week later, the crowd had visibly shrunk. We had volunteers who truly cared, for a while, manning tip lines and passing out fliers, but it only took a few months for the intrigue to fade for them, too. For them to tire, attach themselves to some other story, like ours had expired and suddenly made them sick. That was the first time I ever considered responding to the true crime requests piling up in my Inbox. Even though I didn’t understand it—their fascination with violence, with pain—at least they cared.