My Phone Lit Up With a Text From “My Son” — The Same Son We Buried Five Years Ago, and the Message Said Something Only He Could Have Known

The house had been quiet for years. Not the peaceful kind of quiet, but the kind that settles in after something has been taken from you and never returned. The kind that lingers in corners, in empty rooms, in habits you don’t break because breaking them would mean accepting what happened.

I still kept his number saved as “Son.”

I …