Evergreen, Colorado; one week earlier
Six months, fourteen days, and three hours. Give or take. That was how long I’d been trying to turn this house into a home. But I knew my fresh start couldn’t happen until I dealt with this box.
With my bedroom feeling far too quiet, I set my half-empty glass of red wine on the dresser and went over to the old record player I hadn’t touched since the move. It’d belonged to my dad. The man who’d raised me as his own, never letting me know I wasn’t biologically his—not even on his deathbed.
I opened the lid. The last vinyl I’d played back in Virginia still rested on the turntable.
“Not sure I can handle you tonight. Not with that box glaring at me.” Against my better judgment, I moved the arm in place and dropped the needle, letting Ella Fitzgerald’s “The Man I Love” play.
The first crackle of sound ran up my spine. Each note unfurled like a memory I wasn’t ready for, curling into the air.
I turned toward the unopened box in the corner of my room.
My hands settled on my hips, fingers aching for piano keys instead of scissors to cut through packing tape to get to the emotional land mines.
Just do it.This was why I’d asked Trevor to take Chase out in the first place, to be alone with this box and finally deal with it.
After two and a half hours, all I’d done was scroll job listings, cry into half a bottle of red, and avoid it.
I knelt in front of the box, the same way Mitch had dropped to both knees when he proposed, and I picked up the scissors I’d left on the floor.
With my free hand, I traced the tape’s seam, exhaling a shaky breath as I remembered the day I packed the items inside shortly after Mitch died a year ago.
I sliced the tape down the center, peeling it back like an old wound. One flap. Then the other.
A yellow envelope sat on top of the neatly folded remnants of a life that didn’t belong to me anymore. Inside were divorce papers. Mine signed, his untouched. Because Mitch never had the chance. He’d never come home.
His death had changed me from a woman secretly enduring the collapse of her marriage to a widow.
People had mourned his loss, hugged me, cried at my side, and whispered about the tragedy. But no one had asked what our final months had really been like. No one saw me as someone grieving two different kinds of loss. And why would they? The only person aside from Mitch who had known our marriage was over was my lawyer.
But to lose him like that? To really lose him meant I wasn’t allowed to be mad anymore.
I wasn’t allowed to feel bitter or broken, because what kind of person hates the dead?
I set aside the envelope and reached for his ring box, which was sitting on top of a folded-up flag in a glass case.
He’d had no family besides me to take his belongings, so I was stuck with everything.
Each piece was a painful reminder of promises he’d stopped trying to keep long before his uniform made it into the box.
Died serving our country. Died as my husband. And died having broken my heart before his plane went down.
As the record slowed to its final, haunting notes, a chill crept up my arms and silence reclaimed the room.
I opened the ring box, and something shifted. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but ...
“Mitch?” I glanced over my shoulder.
The air felt wrong. There was a painful, biting sting to it.
I’m not ready for this.
I had a decent excuse to leave the box untouched for another day. Chase would be overtired if he wasn’t home and in bed soon. I’d be the one dealing with our cranky son in the morning, not Trevor. But that was me, always worrying about tomorrow, even though tomorrow seemed to take care of itself.
Thetick-tick-ticking of the grandfather clock sliced through the quiet, alerting me to the fact that it was officially ten o’clock.
I put the ring box away and pushed off the floor to grab my phone to text Trevor, my ex-husband.
