Chapter 5 - Vanessa had already found a place to send Lucas
Three weeks after Ethan carried Lucas out of the gallery, his attorney obtained emails that changed the entire meaning of the previous year.
Vanessa had contacted an educational consultant.
Not about ordinary school.
About a small residential behavioral program in Massachusetts.
The program itself was legitimate and served children with significant emotional and behavioral needs.
Lucas had never been evaluated for that level of care.
Vanessa described him differently in her emails.
Aggressive.
Emotionally unstable.
Unable to accept female authority.
Obsessively attached to his deceased mother.
Destructive during separation from his father.
Ethan read the descriptions twice.
Then a third time.
Most were exaggerated.
Some were almost entirely invented.
Lucas once knocked a picture frame over during a tantrum.
Vanessa described “destructive episodes.”
He once screamed that he hated Vanessa after she threw away a drawing.
She described “persistent hostility toward female caregivers.”
His grief around Emily became “pathological fixation on deceased parent.”
The consultant repeatedly asked whether Lucas’s therapist supported residential placement.
Vanessa avoided answering.
Then came the email Ethan could barely finish.
My husband will resist initially because guilt clouds his judgment, but once he understands how much calmer our home could be, I believe he’ll agree.
Our home.
Not Lucas’s.
The sentence clarified Vanessa’s goal.
She was not trying to help a troubled child.
She was preparing a professional-sounding explanation for why the child should live somewhere else.
And if Ethan could be persuaded that Lucas needed treatment, then Vanessa would never have to say the uglier truth aloud.
May you like
I don’t want him here.
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