Shattered Bonds novel Chapter 5

Suddenly, my mom sprang up, snatching the report from my dad’s hands and tearing it to pieces. Then she remembered the ring they had removed from my body earlier, the one I had made for them. She grabbed it from the evidence bag and stared at the faint engraving inside: Jason Ford. Her tears fell onto the transparent plastic.

Everyone in the station had assumed the initials were the victim’s name, but the truth was, those letters represented the name I had always dreamed of having when I was brought back home to the Ford family.

With shaky steps, my dad helped my mom back to the morgue. Their feet dragged across the cold floor as they entered the room where my broken, mutilated body lay. The sight of me, barely recognizable, tore through my dad like a knife.

I watched, confused. Why were they in so much pain now? They had always said they didn’t care if I was gone. Wasn’t my death what they had been hoping for?

My mom’s trembling hands brushed over the burn scars on my back, her voice cracking. “Jason... how could I find you here, of all places?”

Her voice wavered as she continued, “When we first brought you home, you were so thin and scared, like a little beggar. I even told your dad we needed to fatten you up.”

Her hand stilled, the weight of her grief sinking in. “But everything changed after that. I started hating your sneaky habits, despising the way you bullied Wyatt. If only you’d never been taken away…”

Tears streamed down her face as she wept over me. “And now you’re gone. Are you trying to punish us? Are you trying to make me and your dad live with the pain of losing our son for the rest of our lives?”

My dad, a man who rarely showed his emotions, had his fists clenched tight, his eyes red. “Jason... it’s not that we didn’t love you. We were just trying to teach you to be better, to change your bad habits.”

His voice cracked as he whispered, “If I’d known that phone call was the last time I’d speak to you, I wouldn’t have forced you to come to Wyatt’s match. You had your own competition, didn’t you? An advanced math contest. We could’ve gone with you to that instead.”

Tears burned behind my eyes, but they couldn’t fall. If only they had talked to me like this when I was alive, things might’ve been different. But no matter how much they said now, it wouldn’t change the fact that I could never call them “Mom” and “Dad” again.

The bond between me and my family had broken the moment they chose to believe Wyatt’s lies over me, time and time again.

From the day I was found and brought home, Wyatt had shown nothing but cruelty toward me. He orchestrated my isolation at school, manipulating my classmates into ignoring me. He left bugs in my desk, glued my chair, and played every dirty trick he could think of.

But in front of my parents, he acted like a sad, concerned little brother. “Jason’s so distant at school,” he’d say in a quiet voice. “He doesn’t talk to anyone. Do you think it’s because he doesn’t like me?”