But Ethan was gone.
Search teams came. Dogs. Helicopters. Volunteers who didn’t know us but showed up anyway. For days, the woods were filled with voices calling his name.
No one answered.
Weeks passed. Then months.
Eventually, the searching stopped.
People started speaking about him in the past tense.
I didn’t.
Six years is a long time to live with something unfinished.
You learn how to move through the day. You show up for your kids. You smile when you’re supposed to. You build routines that make everything look normal from the outside.
But there are small things that never change.
The extra plate you still set sometimes.
The closet you can’t bring yourself to clean.
The quiet thought that maybe, somewhere, he’s still trying to find his way back.
Max never stopped waiting either.
We adopted him the year before Ethan disappeared, a rescue with soft eyes and a habit of sitting by the door every evening like he expected someone to walk through it.
Sometimes I thought he knew something I didn’t.
It was a Thursday in March when everything changed.
I was folding laundry, half-watching something on TV that I wasn’t really paying attention to, when Max started scratching at the back door.
I opened it—and froze.
He was standing there with something in his mouth.
It was muddy, worn, and so familiar that my chest tightened before I could even think.
Ethan’s jacket.
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