I raised my eyebrows.
“Are you sure?”
She smiled.
“Probably not to every class.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“But maybe I’ll keep him in my room. Just for a while.”
I nodded.
“Your brother would appreciate that.”
“He’d complain about the quality of the cardboard.”
“Of course he would.”
She laughed and disappeared upstairs.
I remained at the kitchen table, looking at the photograph I had taken during graduation.
Emma stood on the stage, holding her diploma. Felix stood beside her, his cardboard shoulders slightly uneven, his cap crooked, and his smile unchanged.
It wasn’t the picture I had dreamed of taking when my children were small.
It wasn’t the future I had prayed for.
But it captured something I hadn’t understood until that day.
My daughter had not brought Felix to graduation because she couldn’t accept that he was gone.
She had brought him because she was finally ready to take the next step—and she wanted to honor the promise they had made when they still believed they would take that step together.
