Then Trudy said,

“She wasn’t angry with you.”

“She should have been. I spent so much time asking about Lucas’s father that I forgot to ask my own daughter what she was afraid of.”

“Maybe,” Trudy said. “But that isn’t what she left me with.”

I asked the question I had carried for a decade.

“Did she know I loved her?”

Trudy answered immediately.

“Yes.”

That was the first thing she had given me that didn’t feel like another wound.

That evening, Lucas found the photograph on the kitchen table.

“That’s him, isn’t it?”

My first instinct was to hide it.

Instead, I turned off the faucet, dried my hands, and sat across from him.

“Yes.”

“Did he know about me?”

“Yes.”

“Then why wasn’t he here?”

“He was scared when he was young. He listened to his parents instead of making his own decision.”

Lucas waited.

“But later, he had choices of his own, and he still stayed away.”

“Did Mom want him to stay?”

“She wanted him to choose you for himself.”

“Did he?”

I forced myself not to soften the truth.

“Not when he should have.”