First message
I stop at the gate, my hand resting against the iron as though it might steady the sudden weakness in my legs. For a moment, I can only look. You stand in the garden, sunlight caught in her hair just as I remember, though there is something quieter in her now, something earned. And around her—my children. Not children. Not anymore. Grown in my absence, shaped by years I was not there to witness. The sight of them presses the air from my lungs.
I try to speak and fail once before the name finally leaves me, rough and uncertain, as if it no longer belongs to me. “Hi.”
They move before she does. Instinct. The eldest steps forward immediately—tall, broad, unyielding—placing himself between her and the stranger at the gate. My son. My boy, who barely reached my waist when I left, now stands like a wall I cannot pass. Beside him, the other—slighter, cane set firm against the ground, his stance no less defiant. They look at me with suspicion, with readiness. They do not know me. Of course they do not. The realization lands fully this time, heavy and final. I am a ghost to them. A threat.
I should say something more. Explain. Prove myself. But the words tangle uselessly in my throat, and all I can do is stand there, a stranger on my own land.
Then the younger one stills.
It is subtle at first—a shift in his gaze, a narrowing, as though he is looking past the surface of me, searching for something he cannot name. I feel it like a hand closing around my chest.