As I packed up, she asked whether I’d eaten lunch.

I thought of Ruth asking me the same thing on Christmas morning.

“Not yet,” I said.

Teresa handed me the name of a café down the street.

Outside, cold sunlight fell over the sidewalk.

People hurried past carrying shopping bags and coffee cups, moving through lives I knew nothing about.

I walked toward the café rather than directly home.

It was a tiny decision, but it felt like the beginning of a different adulthood: one in which my time and my money did not automatically belong to my son.