Thomas would have been devastated.
“Where are you staying?” I asked.
“With Jessica’s parents. They’re… not happy with us.”
“Good.”
Another long silence.
“Mom? Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“Do you think… maybe someday… we could try again? Not now. I know it’s too soon. But someday?”
I looked around my bedroom. At the dresser with the repaired leg. At the new bed that wasn’t my old bed. At the chair that looked like Thomas’s but would never be his.
“I don’t know, David. I honestly don’t know.”
“Okay.” His voice was small. Broken. “I’ll wait. However long it takes. I’ll wait.”
He hung up.
I sat there in the quiet of my reclaimed room and let myself feel it all. The anger. The grief. The betrayal. The loss.
And underneath it all, the terrible, aching love I still felt for my son.
Helen came by that evening with wine and takeout. We sat in the living room—my living room now, with my furniture slowly returning—and she raised her glass.
“To surviving,” she said.
I clinked my glass against hers. “To surviving.”
We drank, and for the first time in weeks, I felt something other than pain.
I felt strong.
Three months passed.
I repainted the house. I joined a book club. I started volunteering at the community center where Thomas and I used to take ballroom dancing lessons.
I built a life that was mine.
David called once a week. I answered sometimes. We talked about nothing important. The weather. A book he was reading. He never asked to visit. Never pushed.
Jessica, I learned through Helen’s network, had filed for divorce.
When Helen told me, I waited to feel something. Satisfaction, maybe. Vindication.
Instead, I felt sad.
Not for Jessica. For David. For the man he’d become when he chose cruelty over character.
Then, four months after that terrible night, something arrived in the mail.
A package. No return address.
Inside was Thomas’s wooden bowl.
