Every year, I looked forward to my birthday just to see his face at the door.
Then my husband died.
A brain aneurysm. One ordinary morning—and then suddenly, an ambulance, a hospital, and a doctor with kind eyes I still resent.
After that, Stephen changed.
He began taking calls outside. If I walked into a room, he would stop talking immediately.
I told myself it was grief.
But on his seventeenth birthday, I came home from work and found him packing a duffel bag.
I asked, “What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer.
“Stephen.”
He zipped the bag shut.
I stood in the doorway. “Talk to me.”
Without looking at me, he said, “I’m leaving.”
I laughed, thinking I had misheard him. “Leaving where?”
“With my mother.”
The room seemed to freeze.
I repeated, “Your mother?”
He finally looked at me. His face was hard—too hard for seventeen.
“She found me months ago.”
Months.
I gripped the doorframe. “Months ago? And you said nothing?”
He let out a bitter laugh. “Why would I? So you could lie to me again?”
I stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
