The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 212

Chapter 191: Tom’s Trauma

Bella POV

Tom slept in our bed for the first week.

Claim

He didn’t ask. On our first night home from the hospital, the doctors had cleared him, and the FBI was done asking questions. I had given him a bath, put him in his dinosaur pyjamas, and read him three books. Caleb sat on the other side of him, doing voices for the characters. When the books were finished, Tom simply didn’t move. He lay between us with his hand tucked into mine, his eyes wide open, watching the ceiling.

“You can sleep,” I told him.

“I know,” he said.

“We’re both here.”

“I know,” he said again, and didn’t close his eyes.

I looked at Caleb over Tom’s head as Caleb looked back at me. Neither of us suggested moving him.

At some point in the early hours Tom fell asleep with his fingers still wrapped around mine.

I lay there in the dark, listening to him breathe and thinking about the last forty-eight hours. I thought about the warehouse floor, his shaking body, and his voice crying, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy. I did not sleep at all.

Caleb’s voice came low across the dark, over Tom’s sleeping body between us.

“Are you awake?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you okay?”

I thought about the honest answer to that. “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I think I won’t know for a few days.”

“Okay,”

We lay in the dark, listening to Tom breathe.

“He talked to the wall,” I said after a while.

“I know.”

“He read somewhere that talking out loud keeps your brain calmer.” I looked at the ceiling. “He’s five. He read that somewhere, saved it, and used it when he needed it.”

“He’s our son,” Caleb said simply. He said it like it explained everything, which it did.

I turned my head to look at him across Tom. He was looking at Tom’s face, the way he had been looking at it all evening. It was the steady gaze of a man who needed to see his son to believe he was really there and breathing.

Chapter 191-Tom’s Trauma

“He said Mommy in that second video,” I said. “He said it like he thought I wasn’t coming.”

Clam

“He knew you were coming,” Caleb said. “He said it in the first video, too. Come find me. That’s not a child who doesn’t believe.

“I know,” I said, looking at Tom. “I just keep hearing it.”

“So do I,” Caleb said.

We lay there in the quiet until I heard Caleb’s breathing slow down into sleep. I lay alone in the dark with my son’s hand in mine, listening to the two of them breathe. I could not close my eyes for a very long time.

Dr. Abara came recommended by Maya, which meant I trusted her before she even sat down. She was warm. Her office was full of soft things, like weighted blankets on the couch, a sand tray on the low table, and a basket of small toys that Tom immediately looked at with interest.

“What are these for?” he asked, holding up a small lion.

“Whatever you need them for,” she said. “Some children use them to tell me stories. Some just like to hold

them.”

Tom considered this seriously, then lined four figures along the edge of the sand tray: a lion, a smaller lion, a woman, and something that might have been a bear or a very round dog. He looked hard at them.

“That’s my family,” he said. “That one’s Grace, but she looks like a bear.”

Dr. Abara smiled. “Should we find a better one for Grace?”

“She won’t care,” Tom said. “She’s just a baby.”

I sat in the chair by the window and watched my son talk to this woman. I tried to separate the professional part of me, which was noting his words and responses, from the part of me that was simply his mother-sitting very calmly so I wouldn’t interrupt whatever he was willing to say.

He talked for forty minutes. He told her about the room-the grey wall, the camp lantern, and how he pushed his hand flat on the floor because the floor was cold and real, and that made him feel better. He told her about talking to the wall. He said he told the wall his dinosaur facts, because he read in a book that if you talk out loud, your brain stays calm. He told her he thought the book was right.

“Were you scared?” Dr. Abara asked.

Tom moved the bear-Grace figure so it was exactly in line with the others. “A bit,” he said. “At first I was. But then I decided to be like Mummy.”

Something tightened in my throat.

“What does that mean?” Dr. Abara asked gently.

“Mummy gets scared, and then she gets mad, and then she fixes it,” Tom said. “So I just skipped the scary part and went straight to the fixing part.”

Dr. Abara glanced at me briefly as I looked out the window. “That was very clever,” she told him.

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<Chapter 131-Ph’s Trauma

“know” Tom said, and picked up the lion.

Clam

Tom fell asleep in the car on the way home, which Dr. Abara had said might happen. The sessions took energy in ways that weren’t always visible.

Caleb drove. I watched Tom’s reflection in the window, his head tipped sideways against the car seat, completely passed out.

“He decided to skip the scary part,” I said quietly.

“I heard.”

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