“What did you find?” I asked.
“An envelope,” she said. “It has your name on it.” A pause that lasted just long enough to rearrange something inside my chest. “It’s from Owen.”

What the Weeks Before That Phone Call Had Done to Our Family and to Me
My name is Meryl Callahan. I am the mother of a boy named Owen who loved math puzzles and baseball cards and making pancakes fly too high off the spatula and laughing when they landed wrong. Who fought cancer for two years with a stubbornness and a good humor that made every doctor on his care team mention it, not as a professional observation, but as something personal — something they carried home with them.