Not because it was my place. But because someone had to see him. To be there for the boy Natalie had left behind. I wondered what kind of man grief had made him. What parts of him had survived her. What parts hadn’t.
I told myself I was only here to help. To offer my support. To do what I should have done better years ago—stay, even from a distance. But vows were strange things. They sounded clean when you made them. They only grew complicated when you had to live with them.
Back at the inn I showered, scrubbed the sand from my ankles, trimmed my beard with hands that wouldn’t quite stop shaking. The gray at my temples caught the light in the mirror. Proof of time passing, whether I was ready for it or not.
The suit felt wrong on my body. Too stiff. Too formal. Like I was dressing for someone else’s ending. I hated feeling trapped like this.
I muttered goodbye to Lilian at the desk and drove toward the cemetery, counting streetlights like they were mile markers between the man I’d been and the one I was about to become again.
Funerals weren’t meant for reunions. But that’s what this was. A confrontation with everyone I’d left behind. And worse—with myself.
The parking lot was already full. Cars lined the road like the whole town had come just to be near her one last time. That was Natalie. Not just liked.
Loved.
The kind of love that didn’t disappear when the person did. The kind that stayed behind and changed everything.
Everyone she met became her best friend. She had that rare way of making you feel seen—like you mattered. Even strangers. She gave away warmth the way other people gave away change. A coat. A smile. Her time. Herself. Not in grand gestures, but in small ones. She made the ordinary sacred.
We moved together in a quiet procession of shadows, gathering around the graveside as if pulled by an invisible thread. Fabric rustled softly in the breeze. Someone sobbed into a handkerchief. The highway hummed somewhere far away; the world continuing like it hadn’t just ended.
That’s when I saw David.
He stood at the far end of her coffin, bent forward as if the weight of it all had folded him in half. His arms hung limp. His gaze was locked onto the polished wood like if he stared hard enough, she might come back.
There was nothing noble about the way grief tore through him. It was animalistic. Hollow and raw. His skin sagged. His gray eyes were glassy and unfocused. He wasn’t crying. Not in the way people expected. He just stood there, silently shattered, like his soul had been buried with hers.
That's when I saw Elliot. Sunlight caught in light golden-brown hair—her hair—and for a heartbeat I thought?—
God.But it wasn’t Natalie. It was her son. Not the boy I remembered. A man now.
Tall. Lean. Shoulders drawn tight like he was holding himself together by force. His jaw sharper. His brow heavier. A weight clung to him that no one his age should have to carry.
But his eyes—they still belonged to the boy who cried quietly when the house grew too loud. Those hazel depths held storms now. The kind that didn’t break. The kind that endured.
Silence clung to him like a second skin. I used to try and chase it away with dumb jokes, with sketches on napkins, and whispered stories at bedtime.
Now it was armor.
And I was the stranger who’d left him to build it alone.
Seeing him like that—grown, beautiful, broken—split something open in me. This wasn’t the familiar ache of grief. This was sharper. This was more.
Behind them stood a sea of faces—some familiar, some not—all wearing that same hollow look that came when something irreplaceable was gone.
My hand slipped into my pocket and closed around the last note she ever wrote me. Still sealed. I couldn’t open it. As long as I didn’t read her words, she wasn’t really gone yet. She was just out of reach. Still about to walk in with that crooked smile and ask why everyone looked so serious.
Natalie hated lies. And that was the biggest lie I’d told myself so far…
The pastor began to speak, his voice low and gravelly. Something about ashes and dust, life and death, peace and heaven. His words blurred into a low hum beneath the ache in my chest.
She wasn’t meant for boxes. She was sunlight through blinds. Laughter at two in the morning. Every good thing I hadn’t cherished enough.When they lowered her into the ground, the only thing I felt was how unbearably cold the world had become.
When the service ended, people lingered. Offering their condolences, whispering fond memories, hugging each other tightly. I stayed back, not wanting to intrude. I felt like I didn’t belong here even though there was nowhere else I wanted to be.
Eventually, when they’d all left, David climbed into the back of a dark sedan, hollow-eyed and broken, without Elliot beside him. And I finally understood. I’d hoped, foolishly, that grief had drawn them closer. That in losing her, they’d found each other.
But watching the space between them remain—wide and untouched—I knew better. Natalie had always been David’s sun. Everything had revolved around her. Even Elliot. She’d loved them both too much to see the imbalance.
