“How long?” I asked. My voice didn’t sound like mine.
“He told us two months ago.”
“We didn’t know how to say it. We tried. Every visit. Every phone call. We couldn’t,” Noah confessed.
I stood up too fast, and the chair scraped behind me. I walked to the kitchen because I needed a wall between me and that basket. I put both hands flat on the counter and tried to remember what breathing was supposed to feel like.
Raymond.
My best friend.
Raymond, who drove me to every court date. Raymond, who sat outside Judge Marsh’s chambers with two cold coffees. Raymond, who never dated, never married, and never said a word about wanting anything for himself.
Raymond, who laughed when I teased him about being alone.
Oh God.
“Mom,” Caleb was in the doorway. “Please say something.”
“You knew this for a while, but you sat at my table on the Fourth of July, and you didn’t tell me,” I said, wiping away tears.
“We were scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of exactly this. Of you standing in the kitchen like you can’t look at us.”
I turned around.
My beautiful boys. Nothing about them had changed, and at the same time, everything had.
“I’m not angry at you,” I said, and my voice broke on the last word. “I don’t know what I am. But it isn’t that.”
Noah came up behind Caleb.
“What are you going to do?”
I climbed onto a stool and picked up my phone from the kitchen counter. My hands shook so badly, just as they had 20 years ago in that same kitchen. I dropped it once.
I found his name.
I had rehearsed this call in my head for exactly zero seconds, and I already knew what I wanted to say.
