The night my daughter left, it was raining.
I remember that because the sound of it on the roof was the only sound in the house for a long time afterward. Steady and soft. Like the whole sky was trying to wash something away.
Alan was five. He’d fallen asleep on my couch during a cartoon about a family of bears who lived in a tree. He was curled up on his side with his thumb near his mouth, a habit he was supposed to be breaking, and his little sneakers still on because nobody had taken them off.
Melissa was standing in my kitchen with her car keys in her hand.
She’d been living with me for two years by then. Since the day Alan’s father packed a bag and drove off before Alan was even born. She was twenty-six. She worked part-time at a clothing store at the mall. She went out most nights. I watched Alan.
I didn’t mind. I was fifty-five and a widow, and that little boy was the best thing that had happened to me in years.
But that night, Melissa came home at ten, saw Alan asleep on the couch, and something in her snapped.
“I can’t do this anymore, Mom,” she said.
“Do what?”
“This.” She waved her keys at the living room. At the couch. At her son. “All of it. I’m twenty-six. Do you know what my friends are doing right now? Brittany’s in Cancun. Jess just moved to Denver. Everyone’s out there living, and I’m stuck here folding tiny T-shirts and cutting crusts off sandwiches.”
“Melissa—”
“I’m not wasting my whole life on someone who needs something every five minutes,” she said.
I stared at her.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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