For Ryan, the rose pot on his windowsill was sacred. He’d blended his mother’s ashes into its soil, creating a living memorial. Each May, crimson roses unfurled, and he tended them with reverence—as if the flowers held his mother’s breath.
But then came the day his estranged father’s clumsy hands sent the cherished pot shattering to the floor. The roses always blossomed in May. Not during the month his mother, Rose, had passed—that was November—but in May, the season she had first planted them in the garden of his childhood home.
At twenty-six, Ryan thought there was something beautifully poetic in the way life continued its cycles despite death’s finality. He watered the plant on his windowsill, testing the soil with his finger the way she’d taught him. Not too wet, not too dry—a perfect balance.
The single pot didn’t demand much. Just the right blend of water and sunlight to coax the deep crimson buds into unfurling. A new bud was appearing now, small and green yet full of promise.
“Look, Mom,” he whispered as he touched it gently. “Another one’s coming.”
Salem, his black cat, brushed against his ankles, purring as if echoing the sentiment. Ryan leaned down to scratch behind her ears, rewarded with an appreciative meow.
Then his phone vibrated on the nightstand. He ignored it at first, but when it buzzed again, he exhaled sharply and picked it up. His father’s name lit up the screen.
Ryan’s thumb hovered over the decline button, but something—guilt, obligation, or perhaps the echo of his mother’s voice urging him toward kindness—made him answer. “Hello?” His voice was flat, devoid of emotion. “Ryan?
It’s your dad.”
Six years had passed since Rose’s death, yet father and son still spoke like strangers. She had been the bridge between them, translating their different languages of love. Without her, silence had formed between them, broken only by obligatory holiday calls and occasional terse texts.
They were truly estranged now. Ryan kept his father at a distance, screened his calls, and responded minimally whenever contact became unavoidable. Anger still simmered whenever Ryan remembered the empty chair beside his mother’s hospital bed during those final weeks—his father choosing the comfort of a bar stool over the pain of saying goodbye.
Some betrayals, Ryan believed, were unforgivable. “Hey, Dad.” Ryan leaned against the windowsill, staring at the cityscape. “Everything okay?”
“Not really,” his father, Larry, answered, and something in his tone made Ryan straighten.
“I’m a bit under the weather. Nothing serious,” he rushed to add, “but the doctor says I shouldn’t be alone for a few days.”
Ryan closed his eyes. The library where he worked was entering finals week—the busiest time of year.
He’d hoped to spend his evenings working on his novel, the one he’d been revising for nearly two years. “Can’t Uncle Mike help out?”
“He’s away on some fishing trip. Look, son, I wouldn’t ask if I had another option.
It’s just for a few days.”
Ryan glanced at the rose plant—its soil dark, sacred, infused with his mother’s ashes. What would she want him to do? “Fine,” he said at last.
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