“Greenwich Village precinct. And hurry, please. It’s an emergency.”
He nodded and sped up. I stared out the window without really seeing anything. I only thought about Ethan—his broken voice, the words he had told me.
“My dad doesn’t believe me.”
Rob. My son. The boy I had raised alone after his father abandoned us when he was just three years old. The man to whom I gave everything—education, values, unconditional love. The same one who, five years ago, had stopped visiting me, who had stopped calling me, who had erased me from his life as if I had never existed.
And all because of her. Because of Chelsea.
He met her at a casino, where she worked as a dealer. He had just become a widower, devastated by the death of his first wife, Ethan’s mother. Chelsea appeared like a saving angel—young, beautiful, attentive, too perfect.
I saw it from the beginning. I saw the way she looked at him, not with love, but with calculation, like someone evaluating an investment. But Rob was blind. He needed to fill the void left by his wife’s death, and Chelsea knew exactly how to fill it.
Slowly, she began planting doubts in his head.
“Your mother is too controlling, honey. She never lets you make your own decisions. She’s always judging you.”
At first, Rob defended me. But drops of poison, when they fall one after another, end up contaminating even the purest water. Visits became spaced out. Calls became shorter. Birthdays were forgotten. Christmases came with invented excuses.
Until one day, he simply stopped reaching out to me.
The only one who kept coming was Ethan. On the weekends he was supposed to stay with his father, he would find a way to sneak away for a few hours to visit me. He brought me drawings from school. He told me his problems. He hugged me as if, in my arms, he found the refuge he no longer had in his own house.
And I, like the fool I was, thought that things would eventually get better—that Rob would come to his senses, that time would make him return.
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