“Grandma, are you coming? Dad said you’d be here.”

Sweet girl. Always the soft place in this house of sharp corners.

I answered her, then put the phone down and lifted the top page from the folder, tracing the bank’s logo with my finger like a churchgoer looking for a hymn.

My kettle began to murmur. Somewhere outside, a pickup rolled past the maple trees. Normal sounds. Ordinary life. But inside me, something small and stubborn stood up.

I looked around the room that had held every version of us—birthday banners taped crooked above the mantel, James’s laugh caught in the grain of the floorboards, the nick in the table from Garrett’s first “grown-up” toolbox. Love had always been the furniture here. Somewhere along the way, I mistook furnishing my son’s life for belonging in it.