I thought my stepson hated me. After my husband passed away, the silence between us was deafening. He was just 18, and I figured he was too angry to deal with me, too grief-stricken to even try. In the months that followed, he cut all contact.

Calls went unanswered, and messages were ignored. I understood, in a way—I wasn’t his mother, and our bond was still new, fragile. But the pain of losing my husband, coupled with the distance from him, was a weight I didn’t know how to bear.

Then, one rainy afternoon, a year after his death, the doorbell rang. Standing there was my stepson, holding a cardboard box in his hands. It was as if time had stood still. His face, still so young yet hardened by grief, seemed unfamiliar. But it was his eyes—those same eyes I’d seen in my husband—that made my heart ache. He looked at me without speaking, then placed the box on the porch with a soft, “I kept them safe for you.”