He didn’t change. He remained gentle, distant. Sometimes, he’d smile—usually at ceiling fans or drifting clouds.

He didn’t speak. Not then. Not ever.

Until one day, he did.
It was a Tuesday. That meant diaper laundry, reheated pasta, and holding back screams. Owen, my baby, had just turned six months old and was going through a stage best described as “a tiny marshmallow possessed by chaos.”

FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSE
My husband, Will, had been pulling extra shifts at the hospital, and I was barely holding it together—running on lukewarm coffee and endless mental to-do lists.

Keane, like always, sat silently in the living room corner, completely absorbed in his tablet, endlessly combining shapes and colors with quiet precision.

We’d taken Keane in half a year earlier, just before Owen was born. Our parents had passed within a few years—dad from a stroke