Brian didn’t notice the plush lion. He noticed numbers. Deadlines. The shape of the week ahead.
“Yes, Monday,” he said into his earpiece as they descended the front steps. “Have the documents at my office first thing. I want it done before—”
Leo looked up at him, not interrupting. Leo had learned early that his father’s voice had two modes: one for boardrooms, and one for everything else. The boardroom voice got most of the oxygen.
They reached the sidewalk where the lights from the Blackstone thinned and the city turned gray-blue with winter. The laughter faded behind them. A wind threaded itself under Leo’s coat sleeves like an icy prank. Their shoes changed sound as the pavement turned rougher.
Brian guided them toward the side street where the car waited. It was quieter there, darker, with puddles reflecting the dim neon of a closed coffee shop.
Leo’s steps slowed.
Something tugged at him, not like a hand, more like a memory with a pulse.
Then he heard it.
Soft, nearly swallowed by wind and traffic.
You are my sunshine… my only sunshine…
It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t even quite on pitch. But the rhythm of it had a shape Leo recognized the way a child recognizes the scent of a favorite blanket.
Leo stopped.
A few yards ahead, near a shuttered storefront, a woman sat hunched beside a secondhand stroller. Her coat was too big, frayed at the cuffs, and her hair was blonde but dull, pulled back as if she’d stopped caring where it fell. She rocked the stroller gently, murmuring and singing, shielding whatever was inside from the cold.
Leo’s eyes widened.
It wasn’t a baby.
A small old teddy bear lay wrapped in a faded blanket. The woman smoothed its worn head like it had a fever, like it might wake crying any moment.
Brian felt Leo’s hand resist.
He glanced sideways. The woman registered in his mind the way a pothole registered: something to avoid, something unpleasant and not his responsibility.
“Don’t stare, Leo,” he said, voice sharp in that quick way adults used when they were scared of tenderness. “Keep walking.”
Leo didn’t move.
The song continued, the woman’s lips forming the words with a softness that made the cold street feel like a bedroom with a nightlight.
Leo’s chest tightened. The sound wasn’t just familiar. It carried a precise cadence, a particular whisper on the “sh” like the end of a kiss.
A voice from when his life still had two parents in it.
Leo turned his head, then his whole body, staring openly now. He wasn’t embarrassed. Children rarely are when something matters.
“Dad,” he said.
Brian, halfway through a sentence about legal timelines, paused.
Leo’s voice was small, but it landed like a stone thrown into still water.
“Dad,” Leo repeated, certain now. “That’s Mom.”
Brian froze.
For a second, the city noise thinned. He felt the cold air hit the inside of his lungs like a slap. His mouth went dry.
He turned slowly.
The woman’s face was partially shadowed by a flickering streetlight. But Brian’s eyes were trained for details. He had built a life on noticing what other people missed.
The slope of her jaw.
The pale color of her hair.
And the faint, uneven line across her right cheek, a scar that looked like it had been written there by broken glass.
His stomach dropped.
“No,” he said aloud, not fully meaning to. The word wasn’t for Leo. It was for the part of him that wanted reality to stay neatly filed.
He crouched to meet his son’s gaze, forcing calm into his face like a mask.
“Leo,” he said, gently but firmly. “Your mom is gone. You know that.”
Leo’s eyes didn’t waver. They were the eyes of someone who remembered love before he remembered logic.
“She’s not gone,” Leo whispered. “She’s just not home yet.”
Brian swallowed. He looked past Leo at the woman again.
At that exact moment, she lifted her head. Just once. Her tired eyes swept the street, drifting over Brian like he was a lamppost or a parked car. No recognition. No spark. Just a blank glance that slid away.
A ghost who didn’t recognize her own life.
Brian stood too quickly, as if the movement could shake off the feeling rising in him.
“Come on,” he said, voice tight. “Let’s go.”
But his feet didn’t move.
His hand didn’t pull Leo this time.
Something solid inside him, something he had relied on for years, cracked with a quiet sound no one else could hear.
That night, Brian lay in bed beside Lisa, his wife, who slept with her back turned and her hand tucked under her pillow. Lisa’s presence had been a soft landing after Donna was “gone.” Their marriage had started as companionship wrapped in mutual exhaustion. It had never grown into fire, but it had become routine, and Brian liked routine.
Tonight, routine didn’t work.
His mind kept replaying the song.
You are my sunshine…
He told himself it was impossible. Donna had died five years ago in that winter crash. Everyone said so. The reports said so. The court said so. His grief had eventually signed its name at the bottom of the paperwork and moved forward.
Still, the voice clung to him. Familiar in a way he couldn’t scrub off.
He got up, padded into his office, and opened his laptop like a man checking a wound he’d avoided looking at.
Old videos.
He found one from Leo’s first birthday, back when his son was still a chubby-cheeked mystery with cake frosting on his chin. The living room looked smaller then, warmer. Donna sat on the couch with Leo on her lap, her hair loose, her smile careless in the way only truly safe people smiled.
On the video, Donna began to sing.
You are my sunshine… my only sunshine…
Same key. Same breath at the end of “sunshine.” Same softness on the “please.”
Brian’s throat tightened so fast it almost hurt.
He paused the video, staring at Donna’s face on the screen like it might change if he stared long enough.
Then he opened the accident report, the file he hadn’t touched in years because touching it felt like stepping on broken glass.
The crash. The icy bridge. The twisted metal. The note that said “presumed dead,” not “confirmed.”
He had never made room for that difference.
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