At forty-five years old, my mother seemed to have finally found a radiance that had been absent for as long as I could remember. After years of navigating the quiet, often lonely corridors of single motherhood, she had found love again. His name was Aaron, and he was twenty-five. I wanted to be the supportive daughter, the one who cheered from the sidelines as her mother reclaimed her joy, but the math simply didn’t add up in my mind. A twenty-year age gap wasn’t just a number; to me, it was a red flag flapping violently in the wind of…