She opened her eyes.
“Did you see his face?”
I had. I would never stop seeing it.
“Yes.”
“Do you think he understood?”
“Eventually.”
She was quiet for a while.
“He looked like he did when he was little,” she said. “Remember when he broke your mother’s vase? The blue one from Italy? He stood there with the pieces in his hands and he just… didn’t know what to do.”
“I remember.”
“That’s what he looked like tonight. Like a little boy holding broken pieces.”
“He’s not a little boy, Mary.”
“No. He’s not.”
We pulled into the driveway. The porch light was on, the one Mary always left on because she said she liked coming home to something that was already waiting for her.
I helped her inside. She sat on the couch. I made tea. Chamomile, no sugar, the way she liked it since the chemo made everything taste metallic.
She held the cup with both hands and stared at the window.
“I want to call him tomorrow,” she said.
I sat down across from her.
“Are you sure?”
“He’s still my son.”
“I know he is.”
“Even after tonight. He’s still my son.”
I nodded. Because there was nothing else to say to that. She was right. She was always right about the things that mattered.
That night, I slept on the couch. Not because we were separated — we had been divorced for three years, since before the cancer, since before Lucas met Jennifer. But because she liked knowing someone was close. And I liked being close. We had never stopped loving each other. We had just stopped being married.
At 2:17 a.m., my phone lit up.
A text from Lucas.
“I’m sorry. I know that’s not enough. I know. But I’m sorry.”
I stared at the screen for a long time.
Then I set it face-down on the table and closed my eyes.
The next morning, Mary’s doctor called. Dr. Priya Kapoor. She had been managing Mary’s treatment since the beginning, a small woman with steady hands and the kind of directness that either made you trust her immediately or made you want to leave the room.
“We have the results from the last round of scans,” she said.
