“I’m allowed. I paid for eighteen years of staring privileges.”
She laughed softly.
But something was off.
Lily had been strange all week.
Quiet.
Distracted.
She had spent hours in the attic, supposedly searching for childhood pictures for a graduation slideshow.
Twice, I’d heard her talking on the phone late at night.
Whenever I entered the room, she stopped.
At breakfast, she barely touched her pancakes.
Three days earlier, she had asked me a question that had seemed completely random.
“Dad… did Grandma ever have another child?”
I had nearly dropped my coffee.
My mother had died twelve years earlier.
And there was one conversation I had spent most of my adult life trying not to remember.
I was seventeen when she told me.
There had been a baby before me.
A boy.
