Robert sighed.
“And then Margaret died.”
I looked toward the sleeping baby in my arms.
“How old was Logan?”
“Fifteen.”
That explained some things.
Not everything.
But some.
The way Logan had always gone quiet around anniversaries.
The way he hated hospitals.
The way he kept one faded photograph of a woman with auburn hair inside an old book but never displayed it.
“What happened afterward?”
“Logan came to live with me.”
Robert’s voice dropped.
“It went badly.”
I looked back at him.
“We were almost strangers by then. He was grieving. I was grieving. And instead of recognizing that, I tried to create order. School schedules. Curfews. Grades. Rules.”
A small, rueful smile crossed his face.
“I was a physician. I knew how to identify symptoms in strangers, yet somehow I couldn’t recognize loneliness in my own son.”
I thought of Logan at twenty-nine, standing in our tiny kitchen late one night, fixing a cabinet hinge that had bothered me for weeks.
