I never expected to cry at my stepson Nathan’s wedding—not from the back row, not with a sea of strangers between us. And certainly not because of six unexpected words that changed everything. I met Nathan when he was six—wary, quiet, hiding behind his father’s leg. His mother had disappeared years earlier, and he carried that abandonment in his eyes. I never tried to replace her. I just showed up, one day at a time, with dinosaur books, Saturday cookie baking, and a quiet promise:
I’m here. When I married his father, Richard, we became a family of three. Through scraped knees, school science fairs, and teenage tempers, I was there. Even when Richard passed away suddenly, I stayed—through Nathan’s grief, college applications, and graduation. I was never “Mom,”
