Ethan continued.
“You can leave home without leaving us.”
There are sentences people spend years trying to write.
Ethan said things like that by accident.
Or maybe they only sounded accidental because the rest of us made emotions unnecessarily complicated.
He set the compass down.
I thought he was finished.
He wasn’t.
He reached inside again.
The final carving was a house.
Our house.
Not perfectly.
But close enough.
Three upstairs windows.
A porch.
The maple tree out front.
Even the crooked gutter Mom kept saying she would fix.
Four names had been burned into the side.
MOM.
CLAIRE.
ETHAN.
And underneath them:
DAD.
I stopped breathing.
Ethan ran his thumb across Dad’s name.
“Dad doesn’t live here now.”
The auditorium was absolutely silent.
“But he still belongs here.”
I heard someone behind me sniff.
Ethan looked toward Mom.
“Right?”
Mom nodded.
She couldn’t speak.
He looked back at the tiny house.
