At the foot of the stairs, my son and daughter-in-law leaned against the railing, sneering.
"Mom, are you seriously going to find this Amy woman?" My daughter-in-law's voice dripped with mockery. "You used to get jealous if Dad even said hello to a female colleague. Since when did you become so generous?"
My son scoffed. "Who knows what her game is? Dad's sick, and instead of taking care of him, she's just making a fuss."
His words struck with the precision of a blade, finding the fissures in a heart already fractured by fifty years of neglect.
I could forgive Elijah. The disease had stolen his mind, reverting him to a time before me. To him, I was a stranger keeping him from his true love.
But the man standing before me wasn't senile. He was my son. The boy I had carried, birthed, and nurtured for forty years.
A crushing weight settled in my chest. I doubled over, clutching my sternum, fighting to drag air into seizing lungs.
The realization washed over me, cold and absolute: my life had been a failure.
As a wife, I had spent half a century trying to warm a stone, only to be regarded as an enemy. As a mother, my devotion had bred a stranger who couldn't—or wouldn't—distinguish right from wrong. He saw my pain and chose the disease over the woman who raised him.
I swallowed the bile rising in my throat and slipped into my shoes. I didn't look at him.
"Do you know where Amy lives now?"
My son stiffened. He'd expected a fight, or tears—not this hollow resignation. Guilt flickered in his eyes, but he gave me the address.
I scribbled it down and turned to leave.
Heavy footsteps approached from behind. Elijah grabbed my arm.
"You're going to find Amy. Take me with you. I have to see her."
It wasn't a request. It was a compulsion.
I glanced back. The urgency in his eyes was foreign—I had never been the recipient of such intensity. I nodded once, saying nothing, and slowed my pace just enough for him to keep up.
Speed was the priority. We flew.
Seventy years on this earth, and I had never set foot on a plane. Years ago, when Elijah was still whole, he had promised me a trip.
"When I retire," he'd said with that rare, charming smile that used to make my knees weak, "we'll go far away. I'll show you the world from above the clouds."
He kept his promise. But the cruel irony was that my first flight wasn't a vacation—it was a mission to reunite my husband with another woman.