When I was four years old, my mother sat me on a bench inside a church and said, “Stay here. God will take care of you.” Then she turned around and walked away, smiling, hand in hand with my father and sister. I was too stunned to even cry—I could only sit there and watch them leave me behind. But twenty years later, they walked into that very same church, looked straight at me, and said, “We’re your parents. We’ve come to take you home!”

It was a good one.

Then, on a rainy Thursday afternoon in October, twenty years after the day they left me on that bench, the front doors of Saint Agnes opened.

Doors & Windows

And in walked my mother, my father, and my sister.

Older, of course. Heavier around the face. Better dressed than I expected. But unmistakable.

They looked straight at me.

And my mother said, with tears already gathered in her eyes like she had rehearsed them in the car, “We’re your parents. We’ve come to take you home.”

For one second, the whole church disappeared.

I was four years old again.