how it. She loved her son more than anything in the world, and I understood that hurting him would hurt her most of all.
But after my wife’s death, everything changed. I could barely stand to look at him.
He was sixteen at the time. He hardly spoke, spent entire days in his room, and sometimes just stared out the window.
For some reason, his behavior irritated me more and more. Back then, I failed to understand that while I had lost my wife, the poor boy had lost his only remaining parent.
One evening, we had a terrible argument. I don’t even remember how it started. Probably over something insignificant.
But at some point, I said something I would spend years trying to forget.
“Pack your things and get out. You’re nothing to me.”
He looked at me so calmly that it only made me angrier.
“I don’t care where you go or what happens to you.”
I expected him to argue or beg me to let him stay. But the boy said nothing.
He simply went upstairs, packed a few belongings into an old backpack, and walked out of the house twenty minutes later.
I didn’t even try to stop him.
A few months later, I sold the house. I moved to another neighborhood, started a business, and gradually built an entirely different life.
Ten years passed.
Sometimes I thought about the boy and wondered where he was. But I never tried to find him.
Until one day, an unfamiliar woman called me.
“Would you be able to attend an exhibition opening this Saturday? Someone specifically wants you to be there.”
I was about to decline when she mentioned the name of a very famous artist.
“Why me?” I asked.
The woman paused for a moment.
“Do you want to know what happened to the boy you abandoned ten years ago?”
My hands went cold.
That day, when I went to the exhibition, I discovered such a terrible truth about my late wife’s son that it left me completely stunned.
On Saturday, I finally went.
There were almost no paintings in the enormous exhibition hall. Instead, photographs covered the walls.
