My brother beat my nine-year-old son while my parents watched, then left him crumpled beside my front door.

Six months later, in the warm, golden light of late May, the lake house was surrounded by wild trilliums and deep green ferns.

The ice on Grand Traverse Bay had dissolved weeks ago, replaced by clear, sapphire water that lapped softly against the white pebbles of the beach below the bluff.

I sat at the wide pine table in the sunroom, a stack of unopened mail sitting before me.

Every week for the last three months, a green-and-white envelope had arrived from the Marysville Reformatory for Women, addressed to Sarah Bennett Oakridge in my mother’s neat, copperplate handwriting.

There were twelve of them now, sitting in a neat, orderly pile on the left side of the table.

I had never opened one.

Beside them lay three gray envelopes from the Allen Correctional Institution, bearing my father’s cramped, angular scrawl.

I picked up the top letter from my mother, dated three days ago.

Through the thin paper, I could see the outlines of her dark blue ink. I didn't need to read it to know what it said. I knew the cadence of her guilt. I knew the precise phrasing she would use: How could you do this to your own family? After everything I gave up for you? We were only trying to keep Mark from hurting anyone else... You're being so cold, Sarah... Have you forgotten what God says about honoring your parents?

"Mom?"

Eli stepped into the sunroom.

He was ten now. He had grown two inches over the spring, his shoulders broadening, his face losing its soft, babyish roundness. His jaw had healed cleanly, leaving only a tiny, faint white line along the underside that was barely visible unless the sun hit it directly.

He was wearing swim trunks and a dark blue t-shirt, carrying a pair of yellow goggles in his hand.

"Are you coming down to the beach?" he asked, pointing his goggles toward the glass doors. "Toby’s dad said he’d help us launch the kayaks."

I looked down at the stack of green envelopes, then back at my son’s clear, bright, unshadowed eyes.

"Mom?" he asked, stepping closer to the table, his eyes falling on the pile of mail. He recognized the green institutional return addresses. He knew what they were.

He didn't flinch. He didn't look afraid. He simply reached out his hand and touched my shoulder.

"You don't have to read those, you know," Eli said, his voice remarkably steady for a ten-year-old. "They don't live here."

They don't live here.

The simplicity of his words hit me like a splash of clear, cold water.

For thirty-one years, I had carried my parents around inside my head—their rules, their expectations, their cruelty, their constant, looming threat of conditional love. I had let them occupy space in my home, in my career, in my thoughts, even after I had built a hundred miles of distance between us.

They were in prison now, behind iron bars and high wire fences.

Why was I still letting their letters take up space on my table?

I picked up the stack of fifteen unopened envelopes—twelve green, three gray.

I walked out of the sunroom, down the hallway, and into the living room, where the great fieldstone fireplace stood cold and clean from the winter.

I knelt down on the hearth, opened the small iron door of the wood stove, and dropped the entire pile of unopened letters into the center of the grate.

I reached for the long brass match, struck it against the stone, and touched the blue flame to the corner of my mother’s latest letter.

The dry paper caught instantly.

The bright orange fire licked across the green envelopes, curling the copperplate handwriting into black, feathered ash, consuming my father’s angular scrawl, turning their demands, their guilt, their lies, and their endless, toxic manipulation into a thin plume of smoke that rose up the stone chimney and vanished into the blue summer sky.

I closed the iron door with a solid, satisfying clack.

"Mom!" Eli called out from the back deck, his yellow goggles strapped over his head, his face beaming in the sunlight. "The kayaks are in the water!"