I should have known something was wrong when my letters kept coming back unread.
When my son Tyler moved me into a nursing home, he promised visits. “We’ll come all the time, Mom,” he said. But days turned to weeks, then months. So I wrote—every morning, pouring my loneliness onto paper.
“Dear Tyler, today the sun came through my window just like it did in the kitchen at home…”
No reply.
“Dear Tyler, the nurse says I’m doing well with my walker. I wish you could see…”
Still nothing.
After two years, I stopped expecting answers. Then Ron appeared.
I hadn’t seen him in decades—not since he was the skinny boy eating at my table, the one I’d treated like a second son. Now here he was, kneeling beside my chair with tears in his eyes.
“Mom,” he whispered, “I found your letters.”
Then he told me: Tyler was gone. A fire had taken him and Macy a year ago. My letters had sat untouched, piling up in the mailbox of the home I’d loved.
Ron wiped my tears. “You’re coming with me,” he said firmly.
That night, I slept in a real bed again, surrounded by Ron’s laughing children. As I drifted off, I thought of Tyler—not with anger, but sorrow. And of Ron, who’d crossed an ocean to keep a promise he’d never even made.
