1
Later, as an adult, Harold Wilkes would remember the childhood events that started it all, and he would think: If only I had slept through the night.
It wasn’t much to hang on to. In fact, it was nothing. It was the old “had I but known” cliché from cheap paperback novels. But he thought about it from time to time, and wondered.
Because the way things turned out, hearing what he heard, seeing what he saw, knowing what he knew, it was no way to live.