I was standing in my kitchen, piping blue frosting onto a grocery store sheet cake that read CONGRATS LEO, when the trajectory of my life shifted forever. My son Leo was eighteen, a tall and gentle young man who usually moved through the world with an easy grace. But that afternoon, he stood in the doorway looking like he had seen a ghost. His face was pale, his jaw was set tight, and he was clutching his phone with a white knuckled grip. I tried to make a joke about him eating his grandfather’s suspicious potato salad, but he didn’t even crack a smile. When he asked me to sit down, I knew the easy years of our lives had just come to an end.
Being a mother at seventeen had been the defining characteristic of my existence. On the day of my own high school graduation, I had walked across the football field with a diploma in one hand and baby Leo on my hip. My parents, Lucy and Ted, had been my anchors, but the shadow of Andrew had always loomed over us. Andrew was my first love, the boy who promised we would figure everything out when I showed him the positive pregnancy test. He hadn’t run that day; he had held my hands and promised to stay. But the very next morning, he was gone. His house was empty, a for sale sign sat in the yard, and eighteen years of silence followed. I raised Leo believing that the boy I loved had simply folded under the pressure of fatherhood.
