You’re my son.
Not “I understand.” Not “I’m proud.” Not “it’s okay.”—you’re my son. The simplest sentence. The hardest one.
I hoped it was enough. For Ellis, for his dad, for whatever came next.
I stayed until he woke up. Didn’t go anywhere.
Chapter twenty-two
The weeks after we told our families were supposed to get easier. That’s what everyone said. Sierra, Calliope, the internet, every coming-out narrative I’d ever read. You rip off the Band-Aid, you survive the initial blast, and then the healing starts.
Nobody mentioned the part where the wound stays open.
My mom still wasn’t calling. Seven weeks now. I’d stopped counting the Sundays because counting them made each one heavier, and they were already heavy enough. I’d broken down and called her once, two weeks after the original phone call, and she’d answered with a voice so polite and distant she might as well have been a customer service representative. “Yes, mijo, I’m fine. Yes, work is fine. No, I don’t need anything.” The conversation lasted four minutes and tasted like chewing glass.
She didn’t ask about Ellis. Didn’t ask about my life. Just moved through the pleasantries like someone checking items off a list and hung up before I could find an opening to say anything real.
Ellis’ parents were different, but not better. His mom had entered what he called her “research phase”—she’d joined a PFLAG chapter on LongIsland and had been texting him links to articles with titles like “Supporting Your LGBTQ+ Adult Child” and “10 Things Not to Say When Your Son Comes Out.” The effort was genuine. The execution was exhausting.
“She sent me a rainbow flag emoji this morning.” He stared at his phone like he was watching a car crash in slow motion. “Just the emoji. No context. No message. Just a rainbow flag.”
“That’s progress.”
“That’s my mother trying to communicate in a language she learned from a BuzzFeed article.”
His dad was harder to read. The man had said six words—”I need time. You’re my son.”—and then gone silent. Not hostile-silent, not my-mom-silent. Just processing. Ellis called home every Sunday, and his dad would talk about the Mets, about the gutters that needed cleaning, about the neighbor’s dog that kept digging up the hydrangeas. Normal conversation. Surface-level. Bridge-building talk from someone who hasn’t figured out where to put the first plank.
“He asked how work was going,” Ellis reported after one call, lying on his couch with his arm over his eyes. “He asked if I’d fixed the leak in my bathroom. Then he said,“Well, okay”and handed the phone to my mom.”
“He’s trying.”
“He’s circling the airport. Eventually he has to land.”
Underneath that, Ellis’ project at work was unraveling. He’d stopped sleeping the way he used to. Came to bed at his usual time and then I’d wake at three to find his side empty, the blue laptop light bleeding from the living room. Some deployment timeline that had been moved up by six weeks. His team running on caffeine and Marcus’ cheerful threats. He’d talk about it in clipped sentences and then change the subject. Work stress and family stress were the same animal wearing two different coats. Both of them about being asked to be more than he had bandwidth for. Both of them eating at the same edges.
The problem wasn’t that our families hated us. That would have beensimpler. Clean, binary, something to push against. The problem was more insidious. They loved us and they were disappointed. They loved us and they were scared. They loved us and couldn’t look directly at the thing that made us happiest without flinching. That ambiguity was corrosive. It ate at you from the inside. Slow chemistry, turning love into something conditional and fragile.
And that’s what was happening. The love was still there, but it came with asterisks, caveats, and the unspoken message: I love you, but not quite like this. I love you, but I had other plans. I love you, but you’ve disappointed me in a way I’m not sure I can forgive.
We started worrying about each other more than ourselves. I’d catch Ellis watching me when I checked my phone on Sundays, his jaw set, his eyes tracking my face for the flinch that came when the screen stayed dark. He’d say nothing, just put his hand on my knee, or refill my coffee, or close the distance that my mom’s silence kept carving open.
And I did the same. When his mom’s texts came in, the articles, the emojis, the careful questions phrased like someone defusing a bomb, I’d watch his shoulders tighten, his typing slow down, and I’d want to take the phone and throw it in the East River.
The Thursday I’d come to his apartment to find him still in work clothes at nine, hammering at his keyboard like it had personally wronged him, I’d brought Thai food from the roach place. Set the bag on his desk.
“Not hungry,” he’d said without looking up.
“You haven’t eaten since that granola bar at lunch. I checked your trash.”
He’d stopped typing. “You checked my trash?”
“Your trash tells a story. Right now, it’s telling me you’re running on caffeine and spite.”
Something in his face had cracked. Not a smile. The precursor to one. He’d let me move his laptop aside. Eaten half the curry. Showered. Fallen asleep in under a minute.
I couldn’t fix any of it. Couldn’t rewrite his code or call his dad, or undothe deployment timeline. But I could bring Thai food. I could check his trash. So I did, the way I’d started doing. Every time. Because showing up was the only language I had left, and I was going to speak it until he could hear me again.
“I don’t want to be the reason your mom hates you,” Ellis said one night. We were in bed, lights off. The way we said most of the hard things, in the dark, where faces were optional and you could say things that sounded impossible in daylight.
