Chapter 3: The Suit He Made
Mr. Lawson explained the rest, because Dad had planned all of it with him over the final year of his life.
Dad had known he was dying. And in that last year, he’d done something extraordinary for a man who’d spent his whole life unable to say what he felt: he’d built a way to say it after he was gone. He couldn’t manage the words face to face — that rigidity went too deep, sixty years of it. But he could plan. He could prepare. He could leave a message so carefully constructed that it would reach his son at the exact moment his son was ready to receive it.
So he’d had the red suit made. A real one, tailored, bright as the shirts Eric had wanted as a boy and never been allowed. He’d hidden it in a closet he knew Eric would eventually find, because Eric was the one who cared about Dad’s military history, the one who’d go looking for the papers. And he’d left a note with Eric’s name and a test built into it — a test of whether Eric had grown into himself enough to wear the red.
