My daughter-in-law left her phone at my house. It rang—and the caller photo on the screen was my husband…the man who had passed away five years ago. I stared at it, convinced it had to be some kind of glitch, then I opened the message—and my breath caught.
The morning sunlight filtered through the lace curtains of my old Vermont farmhouse kitchen, casting delicate patterns across the worn oak table where I’d shared breakfast with Harold for forty-seven years. Five years had passed since his funeral, yet I still set out two coffee mugs every morning before I remembered. Old habits, they say, die hard.
At seventy, I’d learned that grief doesn’t fade. It simply becomes another piece of furniture in the rooms of your heart—always there, something you move around but never quite get rid of. I was washing those two mugs, hands submerged in warm soapy water, when I heard the buzz.
At first, I thought it was a trapped bee. We get them sometimes in late September here in rural Vermont—confused insects slipping in through torn screens, seeking warmth before winter arrives. The sound came again, more insistent this time.
Not a bee. Mechanical. A phone vibrating against wood.
I turned off the faucet and listened. Buzz. It was coming from the front hall.
“Hello?” I called, drying my hands on my faded blue apron. “Did someone forget something?”
Silence. My daughter-in-law Rachel had left just twenty minutes earlier after our usual Tuesday morning visit.
She came every week like clockwork, ostensibly to check on me. I suspected it had as much to do with appearances as actual concern. Rachel had always been polished, perfect—the kind of woman who color-coordinated her grocery lists and never had a hair out of place.
The phone buzzed again. I walked to the sideboard near the front door, my knees protesting the way they always did when the weather began to turn. The phone lay face up on the polished wood, its screen illuminated.
My breath stopped. Harold’s face smiled up at me from the glass. Not a photo I recognized from our albums.
This was different. Harold wore a purple shirt I’d never seen, standing somewhere I didn’t recognize. His smile was broader than it had been in the last few years before his death, when his heart trouble and the strain of the farm had worn him down.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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