I was stirring my tea when I noticed a letter on the floor inside the front door. It hadn’t been there the night before.
No stamp. No return address. Just folded paper, tucked clean and tight like someone had slid it through after midnight. My name written in thick, blue marker across the front: “To Mom.”
It wasn’t Marcus’s handwriting.
But when I unfolded the paper, I found three pages, written in slow, careful penmanship. It was from a girl named Lisa.
She said she was Marcus’s girlfriend. Said he’d talked about me so much, she felt like she knew me. Said he’d shown her one of my letters — the ones I never sent.
He must’ve found the notebook during fall break. Took one with him.
Lisa wrote about how much he missed me. How he didn’t know how to say it without sounding ungrateful. How he’d started volunteering at a shelter near campus because “it felt like something his mom would do.”
She ended with:
“He carries you with him every day. I hope you know that.”
I read those pages four times before the kettle even finished boiling.
And I cried for a very different reason that morning.
He came home for Thanksgiving. Taller. Tired-looking. But with a softness in his face that hadn’t been there before.
He opened the door, dropped his bag, and before I could say a word, he wrapped his arms around me.
“You’re smaller,” he said quietly.
“And you’re not,” I replied. “You’re carrying something.”
He pulled back, his eyes red. “You gave me everything. And I don’t know how to give it back.”
I touched his chest, right over his heart.
“You already are,” I said.
That night, he made dinner. A mess of sweet potatoes and dry turkey, but I didn’t care. The smell filled the apartment like music.
And when we sat down to eat — just the two of us, no fancy dishes, no guests — he slid a small envelope across the table.
Inside was a photo. Him, standing in front of a whiteboard, teaching a group of kids. Robotics club, he said. Volunteers on Saturdays.
“I told them I learned from the best,” he said.
I just smiled and passed the mashed potatoes.
“Then one morning in late October, something happened that knocked the air clean out of me.”
