The kitchen table was covered in photographs, most of them yellowed at the corners, all of them showing the same quiet boy at different ages. I had been sorting them since breakfast, and the afternoon light had begun to slant across the linoleum without me noticing. Jeremiah’s whole childhood lay spread out in front of me, and somehow it still did not feel like enough.
I picked up a fourth-grade class picture and ran my thumb across his small, serious face. He stood at the end of the row, half a step apart from the other children, the way he always did.
“Mom, did you eat anything today?”
Jeremiah’s voice drifted in from the hallway, soft and careful, the way he spoke about everything.
“I had toast,” I lied.
He walked into the kitchen in his socks — tall now, his shoulders narrow under a gray hoodie. He paused behind my chair and looked down at the photos without touching them.
“You’re doing this again,” he said.