April rain drummed softly against the windows as Eleanor Brooks sat with her morning tea, watching water trace slow paths down the glass.

She had lived in this Maplewood house for most of her adult life, long enough for rainy mornings to blend together. In three days, she would turn sixty-eight.After four decades teaching mathematics at the local high school, retirement had brought a silence she once welcomed but now found difficult to outrun. Her routine was modest—errands, tidying, occasional library visits—but beneath it lingered a question she rarely voiced: would she spend her birthday alone again?

Her husband Thomas Brooks had been gone for ten years, taken suddenly by a heart attack. His presence still lived in the house—in the shelves he built, the dining table he refinished, the garden bench left half done.

Sometimes Eleanor spoke to him when loneliness pressed too hard, wondering aloud whether their son Michael, his wife Lauren, and their children might visit for her birthday. It had been months since she last saw them, and that visit had been stiff and hurried, filled with forced smiles and grandchildren absorbed in their phones.

Eleanor remembered when Michael had been close to her—homework at the kitchen table, weekends at soccer fields, Thomas joking that she favored their son because he resembled him so much.

The distance crept in during Michael’s teenage years, eased during college, then returned for good after he married Lauren. From the beginning, Lauren made it clear that Michael’s priority was now his own household.

After Thomas died, the space widened further. Phone calls became occasional. Visits nearly vanished. Last year, Eleanor’s birthday passed with nothing more than a brief text.