“Mom?” he asked quietly. “Who’s Ethan?”
I turned to him, and for a second, the entire world softened.
How could I explain that the man whose name had haunted me for ten years was not just a ghost from my past? How could I tell my son that his father had been brave, brilliant, stubborn, and doomed?
I knelt in front of him.
“Ethan was someone very important,” I said. “He was kind. And he cared about people. He wanted to stop something bad from happening.”
Leo’s eyes searched mine.
“Was he my dad?”
The room went completely still.
I had imagined this moment hundreds of times. In some versions, I was calm. In others, I cried. Sometimes Leo got angry. Sometimes he hugged me. But in none of those imagined versions did my parents sit behind us, broken open by the same truth.
