Until the day everything changed.
It was a warm summer afternoon. Noah had just finished his junior exams. Emily was setting tomatoes out on the roadside stand when she overheard him talking to a friend on the porch.
“I don’t know who my dad is,” Noah said. “Mom told me he passed away. But there’s this guy from Arkansas—he said I look just like someone he used to work with. A man named Jason Miller.”
Emily’s breath caught.
She clutched a tomato so hard it burst in her hand.
That night, long after Noah went to bed, she sat alone on the porch, watching fireflies blink over the vegetable patch. Memories she had buried for seventeen years rose like ghosts.
