“I just told his mom to look. You were the one who looked.”
When we returned to the shop, Ethan climbed into Marcus’s chair.
Marcus grinned.
“Back already?”
Ethan grinned back.
“Check behind both ears this time.”
Marcus laughed.
“Both ears. Every haircut until you’re forty.”
I laughed too.
Standing there watching my son act like a normal nine-year-old again nearly made me cry.
When we got home, we opened another box of Ryan’s things.
For three years, I had believed protecting Ethan meant helping him move forward without living too much in the shadow of his father.
Don’t dwell.
Don’t make him sad.
Keep life moving.
I had misunderstood him completely.
Ethan wasn’t trying to live in Ryan’s shadow.
He was trying desperately to remember his father’s face before the memory faded.
He wasn’t trapped in the past.
He was reaching for something that was slipping away.
And I had not always helped him hold onto it.
Derek understood that longing before I did.
He saw exactly where my son was vulnerable.
And he nearly used it to destroy us.
But now, when Ethan asks about Ryan, I answer.
Anything he wants.
When I don’t know, I say so.
Sometimes we watch old videos together.
Ethan studies his father’s face like he is memorizing it.
Because he is.
Sometimes we laugh.
Sometimes neither of us can speak.
Ryan is still gone.
Nothing changes that.
But his memory no longer belongs to whoever appears on a street corner with the most convincing story.
It belongs to us.
To the boxes on our living-room floor.
To the photographs.
To the stories I will keep telling until Ethan can tell them himself.
I cannot give my son his father back.
But I can make sure he knows who his father really was.
Completely.
Truthfully.
Deeply enough that nobody will ever be able to use Ryan’s memory against him again.
