The February rain had soaked through my black coat by the time I returned from the cemetery, and my hands were still trembling from watching Margaret’s casket disappear into the frozen ground. I stood in the doorway of the house where I’d spent the last ten years as a caregiver, my funeral shoes leaving wet prints on the hardwood floors Margaret had once polished every Saturday morning before her first stroke stole that simple pleasure from her. The air inside felt wrong—too warm, too still, as if grief had been sealed behind the windows and left to thicken into something poisonous.
My husband Ryan sat in Margaret’s favorite chair, the floral wingback she’d occupied for the last three years of her life when mobility became a memory rather than a reality.
He’d never sat there before, not once, not even when she was alive and begging him to stay for tea instead of rushing back to whatever he’d deemed more important than his own mother. My son Daniel occupied the couch, twenty-four years old and unable to meet my eyes, while Chloe—Ryan’s younger sister—sat beside him with a folder in her lap and the precise posture of someone who’d practiced indifference in front of a mirror.
The fourth person in my living room was a stranger, a thin man in an expensive gray suit who held a legal pad and introduced himself as Brian Patterson, attorney at law, as if the formality of his title could sanitize whatever was about to happen. “Can I at least take off my coat?” I asked, my voice sounding distant even to my own ears.
The scent of lilies and wet earth clung to me like a second skin, and somewhere in the back of my mind I registered that I was still wearing the waterproof mascara I’d applied that morning, the kind that promised not to run when you cried at your mother-in-law’s graveside while the people who should have been weeping stood dry-eyed and impatient.
“This won’t take long,” Chloe said, her tone suggesting I was inconveniencing her by existing in my own home. She was still wearing the oversized sunglasses she’d worn to the funeral despite the gray sky and steady rain, as if my grief was too ugly to witness directly. I hung my coat on the rack Margaret had bought at an estate sale fifteen years ago, back when she was still the woman who hunted for treasures and told stories.
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