Serafina closed her eyes. She could still hear the certainty in his voice, the confidence of a boy who had not yet learned how complicated adult promises could become. The drawing had been crooked, like Marlo's, and Adrian had signed his name in letters so large that the signature nearly covered the garden. She kept it in a folder for years, carrying it from apartment to apartment as her company grew.
"I told myself I was building that house for him," she said. "I thought every hour away would become a better hour later."
At first, the sacrifices had seemed necessary. Serafina wrote software after Adrian was asleep, met clients on weekends, and borrowed equipment from anyone willing to trust her. A small contract became a larger one, and the company began hiring. She had an instinct for seeing how technology could solve problems that other people considered permanent, and she worked with a concentration that made competitors underestimate her only once.
Success arrived in increments too small to recognize as a change in character. She took her first office space, then hired a management team, then began traveling to negotiate partnerships. The money improved their lives, but her schedule grew less forgiving. When Adrian asked her to attend a school performance, she promised to try and then sent flowers after a meeting ran late.
He had once stood in the kitchen wearing a costume for a performance she had missed and asked, very carefully, whether her work was more important than he was. Serafina remembered answering that everything she did was for him. She remembered believing it entirely. She remembered his expression when he said, "I know, Mom. I just wanted you there."
Everett felt the old instinct to tell her that she had done her best. He resisted it because he knew how painful such assurances could be when they arrived before a person had finished telling the truth. Serafina seemed to recognize his restraint. She continued with the steadiness of someone opening a locked room after many years.
By the time Adrian was eighteen, her company had offices in several countries. They lived in a house with rooms they rarely used, and she bought him gifts chosen by assistants who knew his schedule better than she did. He was intelligent and gentle, fond of drawing even when classmates had long since abandoned sketchbooks. He was proud of her accomplishments, she said, but their conversations became shorter because she was always between appointments.
During his first year away from home, Adrian called to say he wanted to visit over the winter break. She had a major acquisition closing and asked him whether he could come the following week instead. He told her it was all right. Later, she would search that ordinary conversation for signs, as grieving people do, although nothing in it warned them that time was running out.
A winter accident took him at nineteen. The roads were slick, visibility was poor, and a chain of events no one had intended ended his life before he could come home. Serafina received the call while sitting in a conference room beneath a wall of financial projections. She could remember the blue light of the screen and the precise moment when someone speaking at the far end of the table seemed to move impossibly far away.