Truth vs.Tension

The boys are with their dad for a few days. I hate being away from them, but I know it's important that they have a relationship with their father. He might have not been the greatest to me, but they love him and need to feel that he loves them, too. Oh, the fun of raising children in a divorced home. It's so hard to not tell them what I think of their father and what he did to me, but they don't need to be involved in adult struggles. I just want them to have fun with him and remember the good times.
That's all they need right now.

Since I am a free woman, I'm working on book three. Book two is a rough draft, and book three has about forty pages, and the rest is in outline form right now. I'm still figuring out the details of it. There's a major plot point that I'm working on, trying to determine if it's more important to keep the tension in the story or to reveal a truth that has been kept from the reader the entire time. My writing muses have been helping me determine which road to travel, and I have decided to stick with the tension. Stephen King once said, "Good books don't give up all their secrets all at once." I'm a firm believer in tension over truth. You can't keep everything a mystery all the time, but it's important to reveal, little by little, line by line. As I continue writing my books series, I see how much of me is in my main character. I'm the truth within the lie of fiction.

In real life, do you keep the tension or tell the whole truth? For my book, I'm keeping the tension until the end, and I'll do the same with the boys. Until they are adults, they don't need to know the truth. Sure they will feel the tension, even when I try to stamp it down, but it's worth it. Sometimes you have to keep the truth hidden to keep your children young and innocent.