The curiosity finally boiled over when I was seven years old. We were sitting on the living room floor on a Saturday morning, the blue light of the television flickering against the walls. Out of nowhere, the question escaped me: “Dad, what did my mom look like?”
The room went still. For a second, I thought I had broken a rule I didn’t know existed. But my father didn’t get awkward. He didn’t try to change the subject or offer a distraction. He stood up, walked into his bedroom, and returned with a small, worn photograph he kept in his nightstand drawer.
“She’s your mom, Dylan,” he said softly, handing it to me as if it were a delicate relic. “Of course you should know what she looks like.”
In the photo, she looked like someone from a different world. She had soft brown eyes and auburn hair that spilled over her shoulders in perfect, effortless waves. She was smiling at the camera with a carefree radiance that looked entirely untouched by the complications of real life—the bills, the laundry, the 3:00 AM fevers. She looked ethereal, a ghost caught in a moment of sunshine.
“Why did she leave?” I asked, my thumb tracing the edge of the photo.
He sat down beside me, letting out a long, slow sigh that seemed to carry the weight of the last seven years. “Sometimes people make choices we don’t understand, Dylan,” he said, choosing his words with the care of a man walking through a minefield. “That doesn’t mean they’re bad people. It just means… they weren’t ready for the beautiful thing that was happening at the time. They weren’t ready for us.”
