I don’t know why I do it then, in that specific moment. Maybe because I have been in this house long enough to know where he puts the things that matter. The desk is neat, the way it has always been, the way Dad has always kept the spaces where he works. There is a card on the center of it, propped against the small lamp, with my name on the front in his handwriting.
I stand there holding it for a long time before I open it.
Inside is a recipe. My great-grandmother’s bread recipe, the one that lives in the handwritten book on our kitchen shelf, the one I have made so many times I could do it in my sleep. He haswritten it out again in his own hand, every measurement exact, every step precise, his penmanship neat and deliberate, the kind that comes from being taught properly the first time.
At the bottom, below the final instruction, he has added a note.
Every time you bake this,
I’ll be right there.
I love you, Millie girl.
The card trembles between my fingers.
Not enough to be obvious, but enough that the edges blur when I try to focus on the handwriting. I swallow once, then again, like the motion alone might keep something inside me from breaking open.
It doesn’t.
A sound tears out of my chest before I realize it’s mine. Thin at first, like a breath catching in the wrong place, then sharper, fractured into something that has no shape I can control. My lungs pull in air and don’t seem to know what to do with it once they have got it.
I try to steady myself. My hand reaches blindly for the edge of the table, the wall, anything solid. My fingers close on nothing.
The room tilts.
My knees give out without permission. There’s no graceful descent, no bracing instinct that kicks in. One moment I’m upright, the next, the floor is rising toward me in a rush of hardwood and blurred light, and I hit it hard enough that the impact echoes up through my bones.
The card slips from my hand, skidding across the floor in a soft, useless whisper.
I stare at it for a second that feels like it stretches into something endless.
My vision tunnels. The edges of the room fade into shadow while the center pulses too bright, too sharp.
My chest tightens until breathing becomes something jagged and mechanical. Each inhale catches halfway, shuddering back out as another broken sound I cannot swallow down.
My hands curl into the fabric of my own clothes, gripping like I can anchor myself to my own body. Like, I can hold myself together through sheer force.
It isn’t enough.
The first sob rips through me with a violence that makes my shoulders jerk. Then another. Then another, each one pulling something deeper loose, until I’m folded in on myself on the floor, the air full of the raw, unfiltered sound of a person breaking in real time. “No,” I hear myself say, but it is not a word so much as a wound. “No, no, no…”
The sound that tears out of me is raw and unrecognizable, animal in its devastation. All the grief I have been managing, all the controlled breathing and careful functioning, detonates at once. My body curls inward like it is trying to protect something already lost, arms wrapping around my middle, shoulders shaking with sobs.
It hurts to breathe.
It hurts to exist in this exact configuration of the world.
“I can’t…” The words dissolve into another sob, my forehead pressing to the floor because there is nowhere else for the weight of this to go. “I can’t do this without him.”
The room blurs, sound becomes indistinct, and time fractures into moments measured only by the force of my own crying.
Then Will is there.
I don’t see him come.
I feel him first. The sudden presence of solidity at my side, the warmth of his hands as they reach for me with a kind of urgency that is careful rather than frantic. He says my name once, lowand steady, and something in the sound of it cuts through the chaos.
“Hey, hey… I’ve got you.” His arms gather me up from the floor, as if he is afraid I will shatter if he does it too quickly, pulling me against his chest and holding me steady in something that feels new but completely necessary. I clutch at him without thinking, fingers fisting in his shirt, my face pressed hard into the space beneath his collarbone as the sobs continue to tear through me.
