For 12 years, I believed my brother was gone forever. Then, on my 18th birthday, my mother gave me a box she had been hiding since I was a child, and nothing in my life made sense anymore.
The morning of my 18th birthday arrived the way every birthday had since I was 6 years old: quiet, gray, and tasting faintly of vanilla.
I stood barefoot in the kitchen before sunrise, measuring flour into a chipped blue bowl that had once belonged to my grandmother.
The recipe was small, just enough batter for a single round cake the size of my open palm.
My mother shuffled into the kitchen in her robe, her hair pinned back the way she always wore it on this particular day.
She watched me crack an egg against the rim of the bowl, then looked away quickly, the way she always did.
She poured herself coffee with hands that trembled just slightly.
I pretended not to notice.
I had been pretending not to notice for as long as I could remember.
“Claire called last night,” she said. “She wants to come by around six. She said something about balloons.”
“She’s your best friend, Emily.
Let her be excited for you.”
I shrugged and slid the small pan into the oven.
Down the hallway, framed in faded oak, my brother Nathan smiled out from a photograph that had hung in the same spot since before I could read.
He was 11 in that picture, freckled and gap-toothed, holding a fishing rod almost as tall as he was.
I passed that photo every single day.
“Mom,” I said, glancing at her over my shoulder, “do you ever think about him on my birthday?”
Her cup paused halfway to her mouth.
“Every day,” she said quietly. “Not just your birthday.”
“Then why does it feel like we never talk about him?”
She set the cup down and gave me the smile she always gave me whenever Nathan came up in conversation.
I had stopped asking questions about it years ago.
I let it go the way I always did.
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