My husband, Ben, and I had five girls and three boys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our house was never quiet, and I loved every messy, crowded, exhausting second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When our boys got old enough, Ben started taking them on father-and-sons weekends to the cabin in the woods he inherited from his grandfather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Five years ago, I waved at them as they left for a weekend at the cabin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was the last time I saw them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My hands started shaking when I unfolded it and saw Ben’s handwriting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If anything happens to me, don’t believe what you’re told. I’m sorry, but I did something stupid. Go to the cabin. Look under the rug.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I read it three times, and each time my heartbeat climbed higher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lucy started crying. “The police lied to you. It wasn’t the way Aaron told you it was.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n She looked past me, and I turned, following her gaze to the man sleeping beside me in an old police T-shirt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aaron.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The man who told me my husband’s death was an accident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your dad didn’t make a careless mistake,” I said. “He found out about something wrong, and he was trying to do the right thing.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n I stood there with my daughters and felt the grief move through me again, old and new at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then Lucy leaned against my side and said, very softly, “Dad was good.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n I looked at the cross, at the flowers trembling in the wind, and answered the only way I could.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Yes,” I said. “He was.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My husband, Ben, and I had five girls and three boys. Our house was never quiet, and I loved every messy, crowded, exhausting second. When our boys… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":173,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5225"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5226,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5225\/revisions\/5226"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}