I looked at Ethan.
He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
For a moment, I wondered whether the boy I had raised had done something I could never have imagined.
Then I remembered his hair, the months of teasing he had endured, and the little girl whose smile had become more important to him than his own comfort.
And I realized that whatever had happened, I was about to discover a part of my son I had never fully understood.
To understand why that morning changed our family, you have to understand what Ethan had been doing for almost a year.
My name is Meryl, and three years earlier, my husband, Daniel, had died unexpectedly.
He was forty-one.
One day, he was standing in our kitchen complaining that I had bought the wrong brand of coffee. The next, I was sitting in a hospital corridor, staring at a wall while a doctor explained that there was nothing more they could do.
