The October sun hits my face and for a second I can’t see—everything white and bright and overwhelming after the dim interior of the feed store.
I cross the gravel lot on legs that feel like they’re made of something unreliable and get into my truck and close the door and sit there.
My hands are shaking.
Not a little.
The visible, uncontrollable tremor of a body that held itself together through sheer force and is now paying the tax.
I press my palms flat against my thighs and breathe the way I learned to breathe when I was seven and my father was throwing things in the kitchen—slow, measured, in through the nose, out through the mouth, find a fixed point and hold onto it.
The fixed point is the steering wheel.
Cracked leather, sun-faded. Solid. Real.
Lee Simms.
Five and a half years and he still looks like the man who stood at the altar and watched Rose walk toward him like she was the answer to a question he’d been asking his whole life.
Five and a half years and he’s still wearing the ring.
Five and a half years and the first thing he said to me wasn’t “how are you” or “I’m sorry” but “you shouldn’t be here,” like my existence is an inconvenience he’d rather not deal with.
Like I’m just the woman his wife was driving to see when she died.
I know that’s what he thinks.
I’ve known since the morning after, when I walked into his house and said the worst sentence of my life and watched something move behind his eyes that looked a lot like blame.
He never said it.
Lee isn’t cruel—wasn’t cruel, isn’t cruel, I don’t know which tense applies to the version of him that exists now.
But he didn’t have to say it.
I felt it.
I’ve been feeling it for five and a half years, every ignored call a confirmation.
You were the reason she was on that road.
And the thing that keeps me up in the middle of the night, the thing that no amount of hard work or black coffee or controlled breathing can fix, is that he’s right.
Rose was coming to see me. I made the dinner plans. I picked the restaurant. I texted her when she was driving.
Can’t wait! Get your butt here already!
—and she texted back a laughing emoji and a heart, and twenty minutes later she was dead.
Those are the facts.
I carry them in my body the way Lee carries that ring on his hand—constant, heavy, impossible to set down.
The difference is that Lee’s grief gets to be sacred.
A widower mourning his wife.
Tragic, beautiful, untouchable.
