The fall breeze rushed across the graveyard. A soft, cold rain fell on the bowed shoulders of those present to say goodbye. Everyone was hoping the event would end quickly.
Except for her, all of them.
Émilie. The deceased’s mother. She didn’t move. She was unaffected by the surroundings, the loudness, or the cold. It mattered only that the coffin was closed in front of her. Her son, Lucas, is inside. Her only child. Her life.
He wouldn’t let her see his physique. They said it was “too damaged.” It would be preferable to keep his smiling expression intact. But Émilie would have done anything to bid him farewell, to give him a final kiss, to touch his hair.
Adjacent to her, a beautiful, distant young woman in black stood with trembling lips and sparkling eyes as she looked up at the sky. It was his partner, who had been widowed too soon. Whispers spread quickly. They said it was too harsh and unfair.
But Émilie didn’t hear it. She was preoccupied with her history.
Twenty years before, she had rushed, overjoyed, to tell Julien she was expecting. He was going to be a father shortly. She was already seeing the three of them together. But that day, a different woman answered the door. wearing Julien’s shirt. And behind her, he was virtually laughing.
Émilie had remained silent. Then she was gone.
Lucas was born shortly after that. She raised him alone with the help of her mother. She didn’t make a fresh start. No matter what, her son always came first.
Now that son was gone.
A unexpected sound jolted her out of her trance.
A voice.
lucid but dim. The voice she knew the most was Lucas’s.
She froze, her heart beating. Then he ran toward the coffin.
Despite their best efforts to stop her, she was already tearing at the lid with a strength no one realized she possessed.
When at last the timber broke way, nobody did anything.
The coffin contained nothing.
There was only a small tape recorder, which sat at the bottom and played nonstop: “Mom I’m here. Mom. I’m here.
It shocked the crowd. Lucas’s friend stepped back, his face a ghostly white.
Émilie, however, stared into space and then walked slowly into the fogs without looking back.
She never saw her son again.
And no one truly knows what happened that day.
In the midst of that chaos of silence and tears, something inconceivable had occurred.
Émilie’s grief-shattered heart was suddenly filled with an odd tenderness.
A gleam. A sigh. A glimmer of hope.
A chill. A spark. A waiting.
The mother said, “I hope.”
Her son might still be alive.
Maybe he was out there, still alive.
And as long as she was alive, she would keep hoping.
