Last Thursday started like every other awful, quiet night I’ve had since my family fell apart. By midnight I was scrubbing a clean counter just to avoid thinking too much—right up until three soft knocks on my front door turned my whole world inside out. It was Thursday night.
Late.
The kind of late when nothing good ever happens. I was wiping the same spot on the counter for the third time, just to fill the silence, when I heard it.
Because that voice belonged to one person, and there was no way I could be hearing it now. Three soft knocks.
A pause.
Then a tiny, trembling voice I hadn’t heard in two years. “Mom… it’s me.”
The dishtowel slipped from my hand. For a second, the words didn’t register.
I tried to make sense of them, but they felt empty.
Then my whole body turned ice-cold. “Mom?
Can you open the door?”
Because that voice belonged to one person, and there was no way I could be hearing it now. It sounded exactly like my little boy.
My son, who passed away when he was five.
My son, whose tiny coffin I had kissed before they lowered it into the earth. My son I had begged, screamed, and prayed for every single night since. Gone.
For two whole years.
Another knock. “Mom?
Can you open?”
I forced my legs to move down the hallway, holding onto the wall for support. My throat tightened.
I couldn’t breathe.
Grief had played tricks on me before—phantom footsteps, a quick flash of blonde hair in the supermarket, a laugh that sounded just like his. But this voice wasn’t a trick of my mind. It was clear, real, and very much alive.
Too alive.
I forced my legs to move down the hallway again, gripping the wall. “Mommy?”
That one word slipped under the door and broke me wide open.
I unlocked the door with shaking hands and pulled it open. “Mommy?” he whispered.
“I came home.”
My knees nearly buckled.
A little boy stood on the porch, barefoot and dirty, shivering in the porch light. He wore the same faded blue rocket-ship T-shirt he had on the day he went to the hospital. He looked up at me with those big brown eyes.
Same freckles.
Same little dimple on his right cheek. Same stubborn cowlick that never stayed flat no matter how much I wet it.
“Mommy?” he whispered again. “I came home.”
“Who… who are you?” I barely got the words out.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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