During the drive home, Toby didn’t shed a single tear. He didn’t look at me when I tried to make conversation, and he didn’t touch his dinner that night. The plastic Cool Whip tub sat by the back door for three weeks before I finally threw it into the trash can.

That was thirty-eight years ago.

Toby grew up, went to Ohio State, and eventually settled in Columbus. He became an accountant, a man who lived his life with extreme precision and neatness. He married a wonderful woman named Sarah, and they bought a beautiful brick home with a massive, green backyard.

Whenever I visited them, I would sit on their back porch and stare at that empty green grass. It was a yard made for a dog to run laps in, but there was nothing there. No toys, no worn paths in the turf, nothing.

I tried to bring it up once, about ten years ago. I asked him why they never got a pet, mentioning that Sarah seemed to love animals.

Toby had just looked at me, his expression completely blank. “I just don’t have the room in my life for that kind of responsibility, Mom,” he said, using the exact words I had used on him when he was twelve.

That was the moment I realized the true depth of what I had done.

I hadn’t just taken away a stray dog in 1989. I had taught my son that loving something was dangerous because the person you trusted most could take it away from you to save thirty-five dollars a week.

Last month, I turned seventy-two. My joints are stiff, and my doctor told me my lungs are showing the permanent damage of the decades I spent smoking. I quit ten years ago, but the damage was already done.

I was cleaning out my old oak dresser when I found an old Polaroid of Toby from that summer. He was squinting into the sun, holding a plastic baseball bat, but his eyes looked completely vacant. The guilt, which had been a dull ache for thirty-eight years, suddenly became an unbearable weight in my chest.

I walked down to the Ace Hardware on Secor Road. I stood in the pet aisle for twenty minutes, smelling the leather collars and the dog shampoo, until my eyes filled with tears. I bought a simple brown leather collar with a brass buckle.

When I got home, I wrote a letter. It took me three drafts because my hands were shaking and I didn’t want to use fancy, polished words. I wanted him to see my raw, ugly truth.