Never go to the farm, Catherine. Promise me. The brass key was cold enough to sting, and the little maple-leaf charm on the ring clicked against my wedding band like it was trying to wake me up.
I stood on the porch of a farmhouse I’d never been allowed to see, staring at a front door the color of storm clouds, while a tiny U.S. flag magnet—sun-faded and stubborn—clung to the metal mailbox by the steps. Somewhere in the distance, a radio played Sinatra from a neighboring truck, thin and tinny across the prairie air, and my sweet iced tea sweated through the lid in my hand like the day itself was nervous.
I pushed the key in. The lock turned. The door opened.
And the thing waiting inside stole my breath so cleanly I forgot how to be a widow for a second. That was when the gravel behind me started to crunch. Joshua never demanded much in our twenty-four years together.
He didn’t demand dinner on the table. He didn’t demand I iron his shirts. He didn’t even demand we paint the hallway the way he swore we would “someday.” Joshua Mitchell was the kind of man who asked politely, made lists, and then quietly did the work himself if you forgot.
So when he demanded something—when his voice sharpened, when his eyes went flat, when the words came out like a nail being driven—my body learned to obey before my mind could argue. “Never go to the farm, Catherine,” he said one night, years ago, standing at our kitchen sink in Minnesota with his sleeves rolled up and soap up to his wrists. A tiny flag magnet held our grocery list to the fridge, and our daughter Jenna’s graduation photo was crooked above it.
Joshua didn’t look at the photo. “Promise me.”
“What farm?” I tried to keep it light. “Are we suddenly farmers?
Did you buy a cow and forget to tell me?”
He turned off the faucet like it was too loud. “Promise,” he repeated. I remember laughing because the intensity didn’t fit the room.
Not the normal room: a middle-class house in a quiet neighborhood outside Minneapolis. Not my normal husband: an engineer who said please and thank you like punctuation. “Okay,” I said, half teasing.
“I promise.”
He exhaled like he’d been holding his breath for years. He stepped behind me, pressed his forehead to the back of my head, and for a second he smelled like cedar and something metallic. “Thank you,” he whispered.
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