This isn’t funny.
Please answer me.
By midnight, I was sitting on the living room floor with my knees pulled to my chest while two police officers asked me calm questions in calm voices that made me want to scream.
“Did he seem upset recently?”
“Was there any conflict at home?”
“Has he ever talked about leaving before?”
“No,” I said so many times it stopped sounding like a word. “No. No, he wouldn’t do this. He wouldn’t leave without telling me. He wouldn’t.”
But he had.
Or at least that was what it looked like.
The days that followed swallowed my life whole. I printed flyers until my fingers cramped. I drove through neighborhoods at night, slowing down at every bus stop, every parking lot, every boy with dark hair and broad shoulders.
I barely slept. I barely ate. Sometimes I would hear a car outside and run to the window so fast I would slam my hip into the table.
Friends came. Then they stopped coming.
People said things they thought were kind.
“He’s 18. Maybe he just needs space.”
“Boys that age can be unpredictable.”
“You have to prepare yourself for the possibility that he chose to leave.”
Chose.
That word cut deeper than any knife ever could.
Fourteen years later, I was standing beside my rental car at a gas station during the first vacation I had taken in over a decade, trying to remember what it felt like to breathe without grief pressing on my ribs.
Then I looked up.
And the man walking toward me made my world come to a standstill.
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