Page 19

EPILOGUE

Six months later

I stood in the living room surveying the boxes stacked against the walls. All of them sealed with tape and labeled with black marker by what was inside. The movers would be here in twenty minutes. I’d been so nervous working up to this day. How would I feel when I left the home I raised my son in?

I couldn’t help picturing all that had once been here. The hallway leading from the living room into the family room that proudly displayed Hunter’s artwork and achievements. I started doing it in preschool and never stopped. I thought about the office on the other end of the second floor that had gone through three rounds of remodeling as the house aged right along with us. First an office, then a baby’s room, and back to an office after he’d moved down the hallway into the bedroom across from me. The walls in the family room that we’d painted together. Twice. The fireplace where we’d hung our stockings every Christmas. Hunter leaving milk and cookies out for Santa, no matter how old he was. The refrigerator covered in pictures. Old school photos we still printed out and hung with magnets.

But all that was gone.

Now the walls stood barren. Stripped down to nothing. The only signs of life left in the house were the dirty fingerprints on the walls and the indentations from our furniture on the carpet. All the remnants of us and who we were, carefully sealed away in boxes. Ones I wasn’t sure I’d ever open again. It was like burying a relative. Some people kept their homes as shrines to their loved ones, but they didn’t have a child like mine. Since the moment he’d been born, I’d walked through life like there was an invisible umbilical cord still connecting us. Like even though they’d cut the cord, we were still together. That connection was gone now. Completely severed. I couldn’t even feel him anymore.

At first, I’d wrapped myself in a warm blanket of denial while he sat in jail awaiting trial. There were moments of reprieve. Times when I convinced myself that he was on drugs so he didn’t know what he was doing; that the underwear had been planted in his room by one of his friends; or that he’d somehow been coerced into doing what he did. That was the theory I fell on most often—that there was someone who forced him to do these horrible things and he didn’t have any other choice.

That was until I read the police report and saw the video. Stan forced me to do it. He said I needed to know the whole truth. The report described how he’d stalked the girls on social media first. Learning everything he could about their lives before he ever approached them with a fake account. He had all kinds of aliases and backstories. Shifting and dissolving who he was, depending on the person he was talking to.

It hadn’t been hard to figure out what he’d done and what he was planning after they arrested him and got search warrants for all of his things. Their search of his room was as futile as mine had been, but they found all sorts of stuff I’d missed when they went through his phone. They even found another phone I knew nothing about. Purchased and paid for with a credit card I was just as oblivious to. The phone led them to a storage locker he’d been renting for cheap on the other side of town for almost a year. He used it as a makeshift office. From there, it was easy to discover everything he’d done because he kept a journal. It was meticulous and thorough, as if all of it was a well-researched science project for school.

Turns out, Hunter had never intended to share the video. One of the other boys involved in the assault asked for it and threatened to tell what he’d done to Chloe if Hunter didn’t give him a copy. He’d been the one to share it with everyone. The video was worse than I’d even imagined. It was just like Stan said—cruel, mocking laughter toward a girl they’d just brutalized. I understood the reason it was seared into Chloe’s consciousness the way it was. I’d never work it out of my system either. Hunter had recorded Chloe like he’d recorded all the others on his secret phone. And the thing no one had been able to recognize that I did? Hunter was the one doing most of the laughing. The others in the room were only following his lead. Sinister. Cold. Cruel and mocking. That’s how he sounded. That’s who he was on the inside. Rotten.

And he was only getting started. His writings included detailed plans of what he intended to do next. They included torture, and he even toyed with the idea of what it would feel like to end the life of another human being. That’s the thing he wrote about the most. The thought that brought him the most excitement. Even his handwriting changed when he described the things he wanted to do to innocent girls. I had to take breaks while I was reading it, like Chloe had to take breaks in her interview.

I was gutted.

Despite all the evidence, I don’t think he ever would’ve gotten caught if I hadn’t found the underwear. They were the only things he brought from the storage locker into the house—I guess he couldn’t help himself. He needed to see his trophies. Keep them close. Who knows how long this would’ve continued to go undetected if I hadn’t had a reason to look. Thinking he was smarter than everyone else around him wasn’t just a delusion of grandeur either—he was highly intelligent. Forensic psychologists performed all kinds of psychological tests and evaluations while he awaited trial. His IQ was 162—a certifiable genius. Exceptionally gifted. Most sociopaths were. That was the other thing they’d diagnosed him with: antisocial personality disorder with psychopathic features.

He’d played me. And who could say when it all started. There were so many theories on sociopathy, and I’d devoured them all. But I always come back to the first feature listed in the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-5 : A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others present by age 15. That’s who he was. My son didn’t care about other people.

I clung to groups on Facebook with parents whose kids had done terrible things, because except for a few people like Elaine and my best friend, no one in Eagle Rock wanted to come anywhere near me. Not just because of what Hunter had done, but because of the utter fear it struck in people about the possibility I might be telling the truth—that I had been a good parent.

And I had been. What did that mean for all of them?

I gave Hunter everything. And not just the material things. I provided way more than a roof over his head and all the basic necessities. I showered him with the things that were the most important—love, truth, empathy, compassion. Being a good human being. That’s the thing that was always most important to me.

But nobody wanted to hear that. Nobody wanted to believe a bad kid could be raised by a good parent. That your child could be a sociopath and you would have no clue you were living with one under your roof. Buying them clothes and feeding them breakfast. Taking them to the mall. That was too terrifying.

So, instead, they said other things about me. Created alternate explanations. Ones that made them feel safe. Fit in their box. They painted me as a neglectful parent more focused on my career than on my child. They talked about how many cases I’d tried last year and as supporting evidence the awards I’d won. My skin was thick enough to survive the gossip, but I refused to live with the death threats that started coming as soon as the story broke. Chloe had already left town by then. Mr. and Mrs. Danes had put their house on the market while she was still in the hospital, and they’d moved back east to live near Mrs. Danes’s family. They knew Chloe would never be able to get a fresh start if she stayed and probably never feel safe either. And she seemed to be making friends and adjusting well at her new school, according to the occasional texts she’d send me—this time, from her real number.

Stan would be here any minute to help me pack up a U-Haul and move on to my own fresh start. He was the only good thing that’d come out of all of this and I was glad my new place was only a few hours away so we could keep seeing each other. He hadn’t left my side since the day he arrested Hunter. There was no way I could’ve navigated my way through this without him. I wouldn’t say I loved him yet, but I liked him a whole lot and I loved having him around. It was just like when my sister died—after the initial trauma and shock, everyone just wants you to hurry up and feel better. Nobody likes living in darkness. But Stan was different. He lived in it every day, so what I was going through didn’t bother him the way it did other people. I was so grateful to have him.

Hunter still called from jail every few days. I used to take his calls out of guilt and obligation. After all, you couldn’t just stop being someone’s mother. Or so I thought. But he would call enraged, absolutely furious at me because I refused to defend him or send him any money. So I’d hang up, and he’d call back a sweet, kind child, as if he hadn’t just cussed me out and told me he hoped the house burned down with me inside it. It wasn’t long before I stopped taking his calls. Turns out, a mother’s love isn’t unconditional after all. At least not mine.

Stan honked from outside to let me know he was here. The movers were probably outside, too, by now. I let out a long deep sigh, then took one last look, and closed the door behind me.