Chapter Twenty-Nine

The memorial stood at the old asylum point, the same stretch of shore path that had, thirty-seven years earlier, taken five boys and given this whole town a wound it had spent nearly four decades learning, slowly and at considerable cost, to finally, properly speak about, and Melissa understood, standing among the gathered crowd on a bright, unseasonably warm morning, that Petra's own patient work had produced something considerably more meaningful than any single trial's verdict could ever, on its own, have provided.