I barely slept. I barely ate. Sometimes I would hear a car outside and run to the window so fast I would slam my hip into the table.
Friends came. Then they stopped coming.
People said things they thought were kind.
“He’s 18. Maybe he just needs space.”
“Boys that age can be unpredictable.”
“You have to prepare yourself for the possibility that he chose to leave.”
Chose.
That word cut deeper than any knife ever could.
Fourteen years later, I was standing beside my rental car at a gas station during the first vacation I had taken in over a decade, trying to remember what it felt like to breathe without grief pressing on my ribs.
Then I looked up.
And the man walking toward me made my world come to a standstill.
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