And instead he has been driving there. Every Thursday. For eight months. Putting on his dead father’s clothes and his dead father’s cologne and sitting beside a woman who hasn’t known his real name in years, just so she can have one hour of peace.

He came home that night and he smelled like lavender and he said dinner smelled good and he washed his hands at the sink. And I stood there watching him and I didn’t say anything. I haven’t said anything. I don’t know how to start that conversation. I don’t know how to say “I followed you because I thought the worst of you and what I found instead was this.” I don’t know how to explain what it did to me, standing in that hallway. How it made me feel like I had been looking at him through the wrong window for a long time.

She said, “You came back.”

And he said, “I always come back, Mom.”

I keep thinking about that. I keep thinking about all the ways I don’t deserve him and all the ways he would never say that to me because that’s just not how Gary is. And I keep not saying anything.

I don’t know what that makes me.