Before everything—before the longing and the nights tangled in sheets, before the texts and the ache of distance—there was just a boy and two men, both he loved and a quiet house too big for grief.
Eli was a few weeks away from twelve the year his mother died.
She had been light. That was the only way to describe her—light in motion, in laughter, in the way she entered a room like the sun slipping through a window crack. Her presence made the ordinary feel sacred. She hummed while making breakfast, left little notes in Eli’s books, and had a way of knowing when he was lying without ever saying so. She was the presence he resented sometimes yet still wanted to feel.
She wore garden gloves more than jewelry, smiled with her whole face, and had a laugh that made the neighbors pause mid-conversation just to hear it. She loved Eli with a kind of devotion that made him feel like the axis of her world—and in many ways, he was.
And then, in one cruel, swift winter, she was gone.
It wasn’t a
