My stepson disappeared from my life for ten years. Then, on my sixty-second birthday, someone rang my doorbell and left a dead yellow rose on my doorstep.
The bell rang twice.
When I opened the door, there was no one there.
Only a single dried yellow rose resting on the mat.
My knees nearly buckled.
For one terrible second, I wasn’t sixty-two anymore. I was thirty-five again—standing at the door, looking down at a skinny little boy with dirt on his hands and a flower hidden shyly behind his back.
Stephen was five when I married his father. His mother had already been gone for over a year. Not dead—just gone.
The first week I moved in, he stood in the hallway and asked me, “Are you staying?”
I replied gently, “Do you want me to?”
He shrugged as if it didn’t matter.
Then, very softly, he said, “Yes.”
