“Mom,” he said. “I don’t want the house. Or the trust, if there’s any way to give it to the foundation.”
“There’s a way.”
“Then I’d like to.”
“Then we’ll talk to Howard.”
I did not forgive him that day. Forgiveness, I’ve learned, is slower than that, and it isn’t owed. But I sat beside my son on a porch my husband had built, with the rosemary and the leaves and the quiet, and I let myself believe, for the first time
in a long time, that I had not raised a monster after all. I had raised a man who made monstrous choices, and who might, one decision at a time, choose again.
Raymond had been right about one thing. Some people grow into cruelty. But he hadn’t lived to see that some of them grow out of it, late, and at great cost, and only after someone refuses to cushion the fall.
