He paused.
“It’s because of a promise I made to him.”
My heart tightened.
My son, Jack Harris, had passed away seventeen days after turning eighteen.
Cancer had taken him from us fourteen months after his diagnosis.
But those numbers could never describe the boy we’d lost.
Jack loved old horror films, terrible jokes, and grilled cheese sandwiches he almost always burned.
He disliked tomatoes but put ketchup on practically everything.
He knew an unbelievable number of world capitals yet somehow couldn’t remember to carry his laundry downstairs.
And throughout almost his entire childhood, Theo had been beside him.
The boys became friends when they were seven.
Theo lived four houses away, and by the time they were ten, he spent nearly as much time at our house as he did at his own.
Eventually, we stopped calling the guest bedroom the spare room.
It became Theo’s room.
