I found a stranger sobbing beside my son’s grave. Then I looked at the baby in her arms.

It was the three-month anniversary of Ethan’s death.

The sky hung gray and heavy, spitting cold rain that seeped through my wool coat and settled in my bones. My boots sank into the soft mud of the cemetery path, each step a reminder of how heavy the world felt without him.

I’d brought daisies. The same ones he used to sneak from our neighbor’s garden when he was seven, tucking them behind my ear and saying I looked like a sunflower. He never grew out of it. Even at twenty-two, he’d show up at my door with a crumpled bunch, grinning that lopsided grin that made my heart ache.

I rounded the corner of his plot and froze.

A woman I’d never seen was kneeling in the mud right beside his headstone. Her jeans were soaked through, her dark hair matted to her face, her shoulders shaking with sobs so raw I could hear them over the wind. She didn’t look up. She just pressed her forehead to the cold stone, whispering words I couldn’t make out.

In her arms, she held a tiny baby, wrapped in a frayed blue blanket that looked thin against the rain.

I didn’t move.

I didn’t speak.

I just stood there, the daisies slipping a little in my numb fingers, my throat tight enough to crack.

Who was she?

Why was she crying at my son’s grave like her own heart had been torn out?

Ethan had been private. Especially after the fight with his dad, when he’d moved out and stopped talking about his life. But I’d thought I knew everything. I’d thought I’d been the one he came to when things got hard.

Slowly, she lifted her head.

Her face was streaked with tears and rain, her eyes red and swollen. She didn’t flinch when she saw me. She just looked down at the baby in her arms, and with shaking hands, she adjusted the blanket.

She turned him toward me.

His face came clear.

My blood turned to ice.

The baby had Ethan’s eyes.

Exact same almond shape. Exact same deep, warm brown color that used to light up every room he walked into.

And when he stirred, his mouth twitching in his sleep, I saw it.

The same little dimple in his left cheek. The one Ethan only got when he was truly happy, when he wasn’t trying to be tough for his dad.