“Can we go back to the way things were before Mom died?”

I looked at my son sitting across from me, his head bent inside his sweater, the yellow box of Evelyn’s favorite biscuits between our mugs.

“I can forgive you, Brandon,” I said gently.

“But trust is something else.”

Brandon sat without speaking for a long moment, then slowly nodded.

He reached over, folded back the yellow cardboard flap and took out one of the lemon biscuits.

He snapped the biscuit cleanly in two over his cloth napkin and put one half down before taking a small bite of the other.