“Which one do you want to do?” I asked.

He picked both of the boxes up and studied them each carefully. One was a picture of a giant winged dragon in some sort of fantasy-scape. It was really cool looking and had a sort of metallic sheen to the pieces which the box said made the puzzle picture appear to be almost holographic. The other was about three times the number of pieces and was a landscape of the mountains covered in wildflowers. It had repetitive mountains that looked nearly the same and hundreds of flowers of similar color. The entire puzzle was mostly comprised of three colors; the blue of the sky, the green of the grassy mountains, and the pink faces of the flowers that covered them. The selection at the store wasn’t the best, but they still had at least a dozen puzzles to choose from. And I had chosen these two on purpose.

I wanted to see which one David would pick.

“This one,” he said as he held out the mountain landscape and put the dragon box back on the ground.

He chose the hardest and longest one. He wanted to spend time building the puzzle. I smiled and opened the box and laid down flat on my stomach as we dumped the pieces out and flipped them all right-side up to see the side with the picture. We started to sort them by color and pick out all the corners and edges. This part David had always been better at than me. I was too impatient to do the sorting, anyway.

I always just wanted to start building.

That afternoon we sat for hours upon hours in the sunshine building a picture similar to the very ground we were sitting on. By dinnertime it had only just started to come together enough to begin resembling something. The other three guys had stared at us off and on through the window and the open door throughout the day. One of them had eyes-on at all times. I think they were pretty perplexed for the most part and didn’t really know what to make of it. Rob had brought us out some snacks in the afternoon, and as it approached evening, Michael brought us both glasses of wine. He bent down and kissed me on the side of my mouth as he handed me my glass and glanced at the progress of the puzzle.

“Looks good,” was all that he said before he went back inside.

Out of all of them, he was trying the hardest to hope this worked out for me. He knew how hard it was for me to trade revenge for forgiveness and how important it made it for me to have David’s transformation succeed.

“Do you remember when we used to chase butterflies?” David asked as he continued to meticulously place each piece of the image together.

Uh oh.

This was not one of the things from our childhood that I thought was a good idea to bring up. In truth, it was something that had haunted the corners of my thoughts ever since David had come back into my life.

“Yes,” I answered cautiously. “I remember.”

“You got really mad at me the last time we played that game,” he said without looking up from the puzzle he continued to work on.

“I was upset about what had happened,” I said.

There was no point in not being honest with him. That’s what all of this process was about now, getting to the truth of things in order to fix it all.

“I know,” he replied as he nodded his head.

Then, after a moment of consideration, he continued down a path I didn’t expect from him.

An open and truthful path.

“I didn’t know it was just pretend, you know,” David said. “I thought that I needed to catch them all in order to be the butterfly king.”

I studied his face as he chiseled away at the puzzle. “I know you did.”

“But it didn’t work out the way that I had expected. I caught them all and put them in my pockets for safekeeping until we were finished. I was waiting until we could count them to see who had won. I thought that when we were all done, I would open my pockets to count them and they would all fly out in some sort of splendid and colorful cloud of flapping wings and that it would be so beautiful to see that you would love it and I would get to be king because I had made you so happy.”

Holy shit, I never knew that part.

I furrowed my brow. “You didn’t know that they would die if you stuffed them all into your pockets?” I asked in surprise.

He shook his head and continued with the puzzle. “No.”

All this time I had thought David’s monstrous intent had started as a small child. I envisioned him as this seething timebomb in a child’s body that was intent on cruelty and destruction simply because he had been the product of two wicked people that had infused his genetic material with no other option than for him to be just like them. I had based my entire notion of who David was on that one incident of butterfly genocide which had haunted my mind for years. I had thought he had intended to murder, when in fact he had just been trying to give me a fanciful surprise.

David snickered. “I didn’t even care if I had the most or not, I just thought that you would make me the butterfly king simply because you’d be so pleased with the spectacle. I wanted to be king, but I hadn’t wanted to do it in the way it ended up turning out.”

I was no longer paying attention to the puzzle. “But you didn’t look at all upset as you pulled them all out of your pockets and piled them between us on the blanket that day,” I said.

I wanted to understand him, but I also wanted to know that he was being honest with me. And just like the rest of the guys, I wasn’t as quick to trust him as I was to try and forgive him.

His eyes met mine and he shrugged. “What was I supposed to do at that point? If I had freaked out, you would have freaked out even more than you already did. I couldn’t cry, my father had always told me that crying was for sissies and not men. It was too late for me to do anything except count them and win the game. It just wasn’t exactly the way that I had wanted to win,” he said. “You were so upset that you screamed, and your mother came running.”

I nodded slowly. “Yes, I remember that.”

“Do you know what she said to me after she had taken you back to your room to calm down?” he asked.

“No. She never told me, and we didn’t speak about it again after that day. The only thing she ever said was that we wouldn’t be chasing butterflies together anymore.”

“That day was the reason that I ended up hating your mother so much,” David said.

His hand stopped putting the pieces together even though his eyes dropped and he continued to still stare down at the puzzle. I felt a kind of sick feeling in my stomach as I waited to hear what he was going to say about my mother. A small thread of fear tugged at my chest as I worried that this might be the part where he revealed the evil was still inside him prowling around somewhere deep where it would always remain.

Then, David started chewing on his lower lip. “While you were in your room, your mother came back out and talked to me about what I had done. You stayed in your room for a long time, almost the entire rest of the afternoon.”

“I know,” I said. “I was upset.”

David nodded. “I know. Your mother told me that what I had done was wrong. She said that I had killed so many tiny little lives and that it had scared you. To be quite honest, it had scared me too, and your mother could tell. I tried not to cry as I sat there and listened to her talk. If it had been my own parents scolding me, I would have gotten beaten if I had started to cry. So, I held in my tears as I listened to your mother tell me why it was wrong of me to have stuffed living things inside the suffocating depths of my pockets. I waited for her to yell and to tell me how horrible I was. I waited for her to tell me that I was never allowed to come over to play with you again. But she never did. Instead, after she was done explaining to me in a way that made me understand that I shouldn’t do it again, she hugged me, and we had a little ceremony for all of the dead insects. We dug a little hole in the garden and scooped up all the wings and pieces and folded them all into the dirt. And when we were all done, she made me chocolate milk and finished helping me put a puzzle together until my mom came to pick me up. I remember standing there when my mother asked how I had behaved that day and waiting for your mom to tell her about what had happened. But she never did. Instead your mother just smiled and said that I had been good and that we had almost finished the puzzle.”

David stopped talking and I thought he was just taking a pause before finishing the story. But when he started to return to doing the puzzle, I realized that was the end of his story.

And I sat there completely perplexed.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why would that day have made you hate my mother so much?”

David continued on with the puzzle. “That was the day I knew that she cared about me, like really cared about what kind of person I would grow up to be. It would have been easier for me to deal with the rest of my growing-up if I hadn’t known that there were other options to the awful things that happened inside my house. It would have tormented me less when she died if I didn’t know that she was the one and only person in the world that cared about what I became. It would have been easier just to shut off my feelings about everything as simply as turning off the tap. But I couldn’t. Because of your mom and the way that she cared about me, I couldn’t shut it off. I had to feel and think about and experience everything as if I were trying to keep myself from becoming what I knew I was doomed to become. And I just couldn’t handle it, Lisette. I wasn’t strong enough to feel it all and not let it get to me. I acted in the only way that I knew worked. The way our father acted—with cruelty.”

I swallowed hard. “You killed him that night because he killed my mother, didn’t you?”

I asked the question as everything finally came crashing down into making sense. Just like a puzzle, all of the pieces were fitting together and forming a picture for me to see.

And my cheeks twitched into what felt like the start of a smile. “It didn’t have anything to do with wanting his fortune. You killed him because you hated him for killing my mother and taking her away from you, too.”

David nodded slowly. “It was the only thing that made sense for me to do.”

He looked up at me and I saw clearly for the first time what my mother had seen in David all those years ago. She saw a boy that had a chance, but also a boy that needed help. She saw a kid that was sure to fall into the kind of violence and destruction that his parents surrounded him with, if someone wasn’t there to show him another way. She saw that he could do it, but that he needed her.

That’s why she kept having him over to our house.

And that’s why she kept him a secret.

She had been trying to save him from himself by using the one redeeming quality that she saw buried deep inside… trust.