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But I wanted it back. I wanted to feel what it meant to have someone sleep next to me and wake up next to me. I just couldn't ever risk losing it again.
Axel's hand was tight in mine, clutching with more strength than I'd have thought possible coming from his little hand. Even though it had been months, he remembered the walk as much as I did. There'd been weeks when we'd come every day. Weeks when we'd braved the cooling early winter air to sit on the grass for hours until our noses were red and runny.
But something about the one-year mark felt significant. Like it foretold a shift.
Like we finally had to move on fully.
The thought of leaving Chad behind made me hurt all over, and from the ashen look on Axel's face, I imagined the feeling was mutual. Ines clung to me. Even she was silent where she would have normally babbled happily. When we turned onto the grass, Axel pushed his shoulders back, releasing my hand suddenly. I tried not to wince from the loss.
He wanted to be a big boy when he talked to his father, and I had to respect that.
Even if it killed me.
Because he was my baby, and he always would be.
My heart thumped in my chest when Chad's tombstone came into view. Even though it was simple, there was no mistaking it. Not with the way the stones that surrounded it had aged. His family: his mother, his father, and his brother, had all died in a car accident before we met, leaving Chad alone. My kids were the only Latours left.
I touched the stone as we came up to it, setting Ines down. She curled her legs up underneath her, placing the flowers she'd brought on the grass gently. Axel sat in front of the stone in silence, staring at the words intently.
Father.
Husband.
Officer.
Chad’s life reduced down to three words and a few scrapbooks worth of pictures.
I stood there, letting Axel have his silent conversation with his father. When he turned his blue eyes up to me finally, they seemed far too old in his little boy face. "Can I talk to him alone for a minute?" he asked.
"Sure," I said, though the request shocked me. Another moment where he wanted to show how grown-up he was, and it filled me with dread. I still remembered when he’d been a newborn who demanded to be held all the time. I still remembered when he was a teething toddler and punching handsome strangers in the park. For him, it was a lifetime ago. For me, it felt like yesterday.
I tightened my fingers around the stone, pausing. While I had every intention of giving my son the time he needed, a part of me knew I wouldn’t be visiting the cemetery soon.
It was well and truly goodbye in a way that I hadn’t yet let myself feel.
With a sniffle, I grabbed Ines’s hand, leading her back to the path where I could keep Axel in my sight but give him the privacy he needed. I watched his lips move for a moment before I stopped watching and turned my attention down to my baby girl. "How does ice cream sound?" I asked her, tucking her platinum hair behind her ear.
"Yum!" she said with a grin.
"I think so too. I'm going to get spinach ice cream," I teased her, tapping her nose and getting a giggle.
"Eww. Cookie!"
"Spinach cookie ice cream?" I asked her with a smile.
"Nooo. Mommy silly," she laughed, hugging my leg tight.
"Okay, okay. Cookie dough it is," I murmured, bending down and tapping my cheek with my finger. "But I think you have to pay the ice cream toll first."
She smiled, pressing a sloppy kiss to my cheek.
As she went back to frolicking on the surrounding path, something drew my eyes to the familiar area in the distance, the place where my mother’s grave sat. My father still visited regularly, so I knew if I wandered over I would find it maintained. Whenever we visited Chad, I couldn’t bring myself to wander over.
I’d never known her, given that she’d died in childbirth, but I felt the echoes of her life through every second of mine. It was there in the way my father loved her fiercely after nearly three decades without her. It was there in the gentle smile I saw in her photos.
It was there in her absence, painted on my soul as I’d grown up without a mother to talk to me about all the things a girl needed a mother for.
Just like a boy needed a father.
