I’m Merl Hadley, sixty‑eight, a retired math teacher from Lakewood High who can still balance a checkbook in my sleep. I taught proofs and patience to other people’s kids for forty years, baked lasagna on Fridays, and kept the flag on my porch straight after every Midwest gust. If you think that makes me naive, you’ve never seen a woman do algebra on a broken heart.

The truth is, this didn’t start with that phone call. It started the Christmas my “gift” was an empty box and a joke about how “empty” I was. It started the day my daughter‑in‑law wrinkled her nose at my living room and asked when I’d finally “modernize.” It started the slow way a family stops calling, then stops caring, then pretends it’s your fault.

So yes, I was in the hospital. Routine tests, not drama—the kind of day American hospitals hum with clipboards and kindness. And yes, my son—born on a blue September evening and raised on soccer fields and library cards—told me he’d sold what he never owned: the car I drove to parent‑teacher nights and the house where his height marks still live behind the pantry door. Sold. Tomorrow’s wedding. “Goodbye.”