you’re still watching. He didn’t turn around. Richard finished his coffee at the counter behind me and said, without any apparent urgency, that he’d be late for work if he didn’t leave soon.
For the next twelve months, I tried everything.
I called him every week, always on Sunday evenings, because I remembered that as a boy he used to get
quietly sad on Sunday nights, dreading Monday, and I wanted him to know that whatever else had changed, someone was still marking that particular sadness for him even if he wasn’t answering.
I texted almost every night. Short messages, nothing demanding a response. Thinking of you. Hope you ate something today. I love you, whatever else is true.
Birthdays. I sent a card to the last address I had for him, a shelter intake address a friend of his had
passed along reluctantly, though I never knew if it reached him or simply sat in some administrative pile, unopened, unclaimed.
Holidays. I set a place for him at Thanksgiving that first year, out of some superstitious hope, and Richard told me, not unkindly but with a flatness that somehow felt worse than cruelty, that I was being
sentimental about someone who had made his choice clear.
Random mornings when I woke up wondering whether he had eaten breakfast or had somewhere safe
to sleep. Those mornings were the worst, the ones with no occasion attached to them at all, just an ordinary Tuesday where I would find myself standing at the kitchen window with a mug going cold in my
hands, imagining him somewhere out in the world, cold or hungry or frightened, and unable to do a single thing about it.
Ethan never responded. Not once.
Richard showed almost no concern.
“If he can’t survive on his own,” he said one evening, not looking up from whatever paperwork he was reviewing at the dining table, “then I was right about him.”
I stopped arguing. I had learned, over the course of that year, that arguing with Richard about Ethan produced nothing except a longer and more elaborate justification for what he had done, each one more
chilling than the last in its calm, procedural logic. He spoke about our son the way a manager might speak about an underperforming employee, someone who simply hadn’t met the requirements of the role.
But I never stopped waiting.
I want to be honest about what that year did to me, because I think it matters to understanding
everything that came after. I became, without entirely realizing it, a woman organized around absence. I kept Ethan’s room exactly as he’d left it, not out of some deliberate shrine-building instinct but because I
simply couldn’t bring myself to open the door and change anything, as though altering a single thing in that room might be an admission that he wasn’t coming back. I stopped inviting friends over as often,
