I Changed the Locks—Minutes Later My Son Arrived With a Crowbar, and Everything Shifted

that you came,” I said quietly. “But it doesn’t change anything.”

He accepted it. At the door, he added, “Maris asks about you. Someday I want to tell him the truth—that he had a grandmother who would have loved him.”

I wrote a letter for Maris to read when he turned eighteen, explaining my side without hatred. Just facts and love for a grandson I might continue reading …