One night, not long after he moved in, I tucked him into bed and kissed his forehead.
He grabbed my hand before I pulled away.
“If I mess something up… I still get to stay, right?”
My heart broke quietly, right there in that room.
“You still get to stay,” I told him. “That part isn’t ever changing.”
He nodded, like he was filing that promise away somewhere safe.
But I would later learn—some wounds don’t heal just because you give them love. Sometimes, they hide and wait.
The morning after his eighteenth birthday, everything changed.
“I need to tell you something,” he said, staring at the table.
“For a long time, I thought… I thought I was the reason bad things happened.”
I felt my chest tighten. “What do you mean?”
He hesitated, then forced the words out.
“Someone told me I was cursed. That wherever I went, things went wrong. That’s why no one wanted me.”
The world seemed to stop.
“You’re not cursed,” I said immediately.
But he shook his head, like he had been arguing with himself about this for years.
“You gave up everything for me,” he said. “What if that’s part of it? What if I… ruin things?”
Before I could reach him, he stood.
“I just needed to tell you,” he said. “I’m going out for a while.”
And then he left.
The second the door closed, everything started to make sense.
The way he apologized when things broke.
The way he asked, as a child, “Did I cause that?” when something went wrong.
This hadn’t come from nowhere.
Someone had put it there.
And I was going to find out who.
At the adoption center, the truth came in pieces.
A foster placement. A woman. A story that spread.
“They called him the cursed boy,” the social worker said quietly. “People believed it.”
My stomach turned.
A child had been turned into a warning.
