“Of course.”
Mason chose not to attend. That choice felt as important as attending would have. He was learning that bravery was not returning to every place that hurt you. Sometimes bravery was believing you had nothing left to prove there.
Instead, he spent that Saturday hiking with his grandfather. They followed a trail through wet spring woods, stopping whenever Mason saw something worth identifying. Near a creek, Grandpa deliberately pointed at a shrub.
“Poison oak?” he asked solemnly.
Mason groaned. “You are never going to stop, are you?”
“Probably not, Professor.”
Mason paused. The nickname landed differently now. No laughter behind a cabin door. No counselor trying to make him small. Just his grandfather smiling beside a trail.
“Thimbleberry,” Mason corrected him.
Grandpa nodded. “Knew I brought the expert.”
Mason opened the field-guide booklet and pressed a new leaf sketch onto an empty page. At the bottom he wrote the date and the name of the trail.
There were still black lines in the old letter at home. There always would be. But there was blank paper here too.
Mason kept writing.
Years later, Mason would remember the open door more clearly than the locked one. It became his private definition of safety: not being forced to prove toughness, but knowing he could step inside, ask a question, and still belong. Always.
