I read it twice. Then I looked down at my grandson.
Finn was nine months old, and he was zipped into a plush orange pumpkin suit that covered him from his chin to the tips of his toes. A little green stem stuck up from the hood. Only his face showed—round cheeks, brown eyes, a bit of drool on his chin.
It was Halloween, a little after six in the evening, and he was sitting alone on my front porch.
His parents were already gone.
I’m Linda Carver. I’m sixty-one, a retired school librarian in Westerville, Ohio, and until that night I had held my only grandchild maybe five times in his whole life. Not because I lived far away. I lived eleven minutes from my son’s house.
I had stopped asking why. I’d decided my daughter-in-law simply didn’t want me around.
But standing on that porch, holding a note that told me what I could and could not do for my own grandson, I had a strange feeling that I’d been wrong about something.
I just didn’t know yet how wrong.
