I don’t see my parents anymore. That’s not revenge. It’s just the honest shape of what they left.
Nathan still wears the silver cross. He never took it off, all those years, even before he knew whose hands had placed it in his blanket. He says, on the hard days, it was the one proof that somewhere out there, someone had wanted him enough to give him the only thing she had.
I did want him. I wanted him for thirty-one years, forty minutes away, with no idea the road was that short.
“Did they ever tell you what really happened to him?” my son asked me, standing over my hospital bed.
No. They never did.
But he came and told me himself — walked right into the room wearing my grandmother’s cross, and gave me back the truth, and my son, and the second half of a life I thought I’d lost.
