I looked at the headstone for a long time.
“Bea was there. At the party.” I said it to the stone because I couldn’t say it to anyone else without it becoming a conversationabout hope or progress or what it meant. Here it was just a fact. “She looked good. We talked for about ten seconds in the hallway. The kind of thing that used to happen a hundred times a day and now feels like holding your breath underwater.”
I crouched down and adjusted the roses so they sat straighter against the stone.
“I miss you. Not the way I missed you at the beginning—that was all panic and guilt and wanting to trade places. Now it’s just—you’re not here, and you should be. You should be at that birthday party eating cake and letting Knox beat you at pool. You should be giving me shit about my route plans. You should’ve had your patching-in party by now. The brothers had started tossing around road names for you.” I swallowed. “You should be here.”
I stood up. My knees protested.
“I’m trying, Danny. I’m doing the work. Not for her, not for the club, not for your memory—for me. Because you believed I was worth saving, and I’m not going to prove you wrong.”
I stayed a few more minutes. Then I got in the truck and drove to Lindsay’s house.
Lindsay had the door open before I knocked.
“I saw you park from the window,” she said, and waved me in without ceremony.
The kitchen smelled the same as it always did—something on the stove, the particular warmth of a small house that was well-lived-in. She put the yellow roses in the vase on the windowsill, next to the photo of Danny in his prospect cut, grinning at the camera with all the confidence of youth.
I’d sat at this table six times now. Each visit had felt different—the first two raw and barely survivable, then steadier, then something approaching ordinary. Not ordinary like forgettable. Ordinary like reliable.
“Coffee?” she said.
“Please.”
She moved around the kitchen the way she always did, unhurried. Danny had gotten that from her. I used to stand over him while he changed tires — the kid never rushed. Did everything right, just slow. I’d tell him to pick up the pace and he’d nod and do the next one exactly the same way. Drove me crazy at the time. Now I’d give anything to watch him take twenty minutes on a rear wheel again.
“How are you doing?” she asked. “Really, not that I’m fine business.”
“Better.” I wrapped my hands around the cup. “Still hard. But I’m handling it differently now.”
“I can see that.” She set the coffee down in front of me. “You look present. Not like you’re trying to escape.”
“I was trying to escape for a long time. Didn’t work out so well.”
“It never does.” She reached across the table and patted my hand. “You were his hero. You know that.”
The words landed where they always did—guilt and grief tangled together somewhere behind my ribs. “I should have protected him better.”
“He made his choice.” Her voice was firm. “He chose to protect you, the same way you would have protected him. That’s what brothers do.”
“I know. I’m just—” I took a breath. “I’m trying.”
Lindsay’s eyes softened. “I’ve said this before, but I’m not sure you were ready to hear it.” She squeezed my hand. “Danny didn’t save you so you could suffer forever. He saved you because he believed you were worth saving. Prove him right.”
“And you?” I said. “How are you doing with today?”
She waved the question off the way she always did. “I’m sad. I miss my son. But he died protecting someone he loved. Not every mother gets to say her son died a hero.” She topped up mycoffee without asking. “And you keep coming. You keep talking about him. He hasn’t been forgotten. That matters more than you know.”
I stayed for another hour. Each time I came, she told me a new story. Today it was his first bike—a secondhand ten-speed that he’d ridden into the mailbox the first day because he was too busy waving at the neighbors to watch where he was going. I told her about the time he’d misread a route map and led three brothers twenty miles in the wrong direction, then talked his way out of the ribbing by buying everyone lunch with money he didn’t have.
She laughed at that. I laughed too. It surprised me—the sound of it, how natural it felt, how it existed alongside the grief instead of in opposition to it.
“Same time next month?” she said at the door.
“Same time next month.”
She hugged me—the brief, firm kind, the way she always did. “Drive safe.”
