I was sitting on my late son’s bed holding one of his T-shirts when his teacher called and said he had left something for me at school. My boy had been gone for weeks. I had not heard his voice or seen his face one last time, and suddenly someone was telling me he still had something to say.

I had Owen’s blue camp shirt pressed to my face when the phone rang.

It still smelled faintly of him. I sat in his room every day now, surrounded by schoolbooks, sneakers, and baseball cards, and the kind of silence that did not feel empty so much as cruel.