I was sitting on my late son’s bed, holding one of his T-shirts, when his teacher called to say he had left something for me at school.
My boy had been gone for weeks. I hadn’t heard his voice or seen his face one last time—and suddenly, someone was telling me he still had something to say.
I pressed Owen’s blue camp shirt to my face when the phone rang.
It still carried a faint trace of his scent. I spent every day in his room now, surrounded by schoolbooks, sneakers, baseball cards—and a silence that didn’t feel empty so much as unbearably cruel.
Continue on the next page:
