Chapter 9 - THE COLLINS HOUSE
Brady and Jasper lived with their mother most weekdays.
Their father, Eric Collins, lived forty minutes away.
Divorced.
Joint custody.
Eric coached a private baseball team.
Brady played shortstop.
Good player.
Not future major-league certainty.
A kid.
Still, baseball mattered.
Eric had a rule:
School discipline means no travel team.
Reasonable.
Brady knew.
That was why the first school report frightened him.
If the book-fair money became theft:
Team risk.
If Milo’s cards became coercion:
More risk.
If a pattern formed:
Definitely.
So he managed the story.
At first with denial.
Then witnesses.
Jasper.
Friends.
Then pressure on younger children.
Not because his father told him to.
Eric knew none of it.
When investigators spoke with him, he looked sick.
“I told him if he bullied younger kids, baseball was done.”
The investigator asked:
“Could that have made him afraid to tell you?”
Eric stopped.
“Yes.”
Consequences sometimes deter behavior.
Sometimes they make children more invested in hiding it.
That did not make the rule wrong.
It meant the adults had to understand what happened next.
Jasper’s motive was simpler.
Brady was his brother.
Older.
Popular.
Protective.
Jasper had spent years benefiting from being:
Brady’s little brother.
He repeated Brady’s stories.
Blocked children.
Laughed.
Sometimes participated because the alternative was becoming one of Brady’s targets.
Again:
Explanation.
May you like
Not innocence.
The deeper structure would become clear in the next chapter.
