Twenty-six years had passed since my son died, but September 30 still had a way of making the air feel heavier.
I’d learned how to live around the date. You do, eventually. You learn which roads to avoid. Which songs to turn off. Which aisle of the grocery store has the cereal he liked, so you don’t walk down it by accident.
I had a husband who loved me. A daughter who called far too often just to check in. A house with a big kitchen and a garden full of tomatoes and a dog who slept on my feet every night.
My life was good. Most days, it was really good.
But every year on September 30, I baked the lemon cake Daniel used to ask for on his birthday, even though September 30 wasn’t his birthday. It was the day he died. I baked it anyway. I’d eat one slice standing up at the counter, and then I’d give the rest to the neighbors.
That year, I was halfway through mixing the batter when the doorbell rang.
I wiped my hands on a dish towel and went to the front door.
A man in an expensive gray suit was standing on my porch. Fifties, maybe. Silver hair. Polished shoes. A leather briefcase in one hand. And in the other, held against his chest, a large cardboard box.
“Miss Nora?” he said.
Nobody had called me Miss Nora in a very long time. Not since I worked the register at the church thrift shop, back when kids from the neighborhood used to come in looking for cheap winter coats.
“Yes?”
“My name is Thomas Whitfield,” he said. “I’m Owen’s attorney. He’s been looking for you for years.”
For a second, the name meant nothing to me.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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