I never thought a plain white envelope could make me dread my own son’s birthday.
But there it was on the kitchen table the morning Adrian turned eighteen. Same size as always. Same cheap white paper. Same neat, careful handwriting spelling out our address, the way it had every single year since he was six.
He came downstairs in his socks, hair sticking up, and saw it before he saw the cake.
He stopped in the doorway and smiled. Not the crooked, half-annoyed smile he’d worn for most of high school. The old one. The one from when he was little and the whole world was a surprise waiting to happen.
“There it is,” he said softly.
He picked it up and turned it over in his hands like it was something precious.
“Open it,” I said.
“You sound nervous.”
“I’m always nervous.”
“About my birthday card?”
“About everything,” I said. “I raised you.”
He laughed. Then he slid his finger under the flap.
I was standing at the counter, pretending to rinse dishes that were already clean. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He pulled out the card first. A cartoon balloon on the front, the same bland kind as always.
Then he pulled out something else.
A folded letter.
That was new.
I stopped moving. The water ran over my hands.
Adrian unfolded it. And all the color drained out of his face so fast it scared me.
My name is Nora Walker. I’m forty-one years old. I’ve been a single mother since before my son was born.
The first envelope showed up when Adrian turned six.
I remember it exactly, because it was the same week the transmission died in my car and I was trying to figure out how to pay for it while also paying for a birthday party at the bowling alley that Adrian had been begging for since Christmas.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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