I told myself he was coping in the only way he knew how. I told myself we were both just surviving.
But there were moments — sitting in Owen’s room in the evenings, listening to the particular silence of a house where a child used to be — when I felt like I had lost two people at the lake and only one of them was thirteen years old.
The Drive to School and the Wooden Bird Owen Made That Still Hung From My Mirror
I found my mother in the kitchen when I came downstairs. She had been staying with us since the funeral — sleeping in the guest room, making sure I ate, sitting with me in the evenings when the silence became too loud. She looked up from the sink the moment she saw my face.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Owen left something at school,” I said. “His teacher found it. She said it has my name on it.”
