I’m forty-one now, and there are mornings when I wake up and have to sit perfectly still for a few seconds, just to make sure I’m really here—really living this version of my life. Grief does that to a person. It rearranges time. It turns whole years into a fog and then, without warning, makes a single memory so sharp you can taste it. For twenty years I was Peter’s wife in the truest sense of the word, not in a glossy, curated way, but in the ordinary, hardworking way that actually holds a family together.

We lived in a four-bedroom colonial with floors that creaked no matter how often we promised to fix them, and a back porch that seemed to absorb weather the way a tired body absorbs stress. We raised two kids in that house, and they filled it with backpacks on the stairs, sticky notes on the fridge, and laughter so loud it felt like it could push the walls outward. My son is nineteen now and studying engineering far from home, and my daughter is twenty-one and chose a college as far east as she could manage, partly for her future and partly, I think, to prove she could leave and still be loved.