Mason had none of that fog.

He was eleven.

He did not have a reputation to protect or a comfortable story to defend.

He had only what he had seen with his own eyes: a woman in a white dress, dragged down a cellar stair.

And so when the moment came — when he saw her alive and knew, with a child’s clarity, that she was the same woman — there was nothing in the way of his telling.

He simply told what was true, because he had no reason invested in it being false.