I believed my son was only burying his senior-year nerves out in the garage. But when his prom date got out of the car, she was not a teenage girl. She was my dead husband’s greatest secret.

The kitchen window held a gentle spring evening in its frame, the kind of golden light that made the yard look like it belonged in a magazine. I stood at the sink with an unused dish towel in my hand, watching the sky blush pink behind the neighbor’s maple tree.

For the first time in months, I allowed my shoulders to relax.

Austin had been quiet all year.

Not exactly unhappy. Just somewhere I could not follow.

I kept telling myself it was senior-year nerves. College decisions. The pressure of nearly being an adult.

But it was something deeper, and I knew that, even while I refused to say it aloud.

His father had been dead for nine years. Long enough that I no longer startled at the empty chair, yet some nights I still caught myself setting three places at the table without meaning to.

Most evenings, Austin vanished into the garage. He was working on an old motorcycle out there. It did not run, and had not run since before his father died.

I had told him it was a junker from an uncle, though recently he had stopped repeating that explanation back to me, and I had stopped giving it.

Footsteps on the stairs brought me back.

I turned, and there he was, my boy dressed in a charcoal suit, his tie slightly crooked.

“Well?” he asked, holding out his arms.