I married my late husband’s closest friend two years after losing the love of my life, and on our wedding night he looked at me through tears and said words that made the air leave my lungs: “You deserve to know the truth. I can’t keep it from you anymore.” Until that moment, I believed I had already endured the worst pain a heart could survive. I was seventy-one years old, widowed after nearly five decades of marriage, and convinced that grief had carved out every hollow it possibly could. My name is Eleanor, though most people call me Ellie.

When my husband Conan died in a crash on Route 7, struck by a drunk driver who fled the scene, the world did not simply dim—it went silent. The kind of silence that lingers even in crowded rooms. The kind that wakes you at three in the morning reaching across cold sheets, forgetting for one disorienting second that the space beside you will never again be filled. Conan had been my companion since I was twenty-three. We had weathered lean years, raised children, buried parents, celebrated grandchildren. He knew the cadence of my thoughts before I spoke them.