I’m not thinking about that house or the woman who bought it.
I’m thinking about the road.The way the light falls through the tree line this time of day, everything gold and long-shadowed.The way the asphalt cracks in the same places every spring and the county never fixes it.The deer crossing sign at mile marker four that’s been bent since Tommy Whelan hit it junior year and no one ever straightened because out here things just stay the way they break.
I’m not thinking about the strip of skin between her sweatshirt and her shorts.
Anything but that.
The truck smells like sawdust and the coffee I didn’t finish this morning.The radio’s off.It’s been off for two years.Emily used to change the station every thirty seconds—country, pop, oldies, back to country—like she was looking for a song that matched whatever she was feeling and couldn’t find it.After the accident I turned it off and the silence felt so much like her absence that I left it.Kept it.Made it mine.
I take the long way.I don’t decide to.The truck just goes in that direction, the way a dog finds a buried bone—not because it’s hungry, but because it remembers it’s there.
Dr.Matthews lives at 114 Ridgewood.White colonial.Green shutters.The lawn is immaculate — the kind that gets treated by a service because a man like Matthews doesn’t mow his own grass.He saves lives.He doesn’t do yard work.The neighborhood agrees.The hospital agrees.The judge who declined to press charges agreed.
Everyone agreed except me.
I park three houses down.Same spot.Under the oak that drops acorns on my hood like a slow, patient clock.Nobody notices my truck.Nobody notices me.That’s the thing about grief—it makes you invisible.People look right through you because looking at you means acknowledging what happened, and nobody wants to do that on a Wednesday afternoon.
The garage door opens at 6:12.Right on schedule.Dr.Matthews pulls in —silver Lexus, same color as the one he was driving the morning he crossed the center line.He replaced it.Same make.Same model.Same color.Like it was a subscription.They let him keep his license.Let him keep his job.Let him keep driving the same car that killed my wife and son.
He gets out.Grabs a gym bag and a paper sack from the passenger side—barbecue, probably.His wife doesn’t cook on Wednesdays.I know this because I know everything about this man.His schedule.His habits.His daughter’s school.His wife’s book club.The name of the dog they got six months after the accident—a golden retriever named Sunny, because why not, because life goes on, because some people get to replace what they lost and some people just get to watch.
The front door opens before he reaches it.His daughter.She’s six now.Brown hair in a ponytail.She runs to him and he picks her up—one arm, easy, practiced—and carries her inside.
Evan would have been six.
Some nights I sit here and plan.Not violence—I’m past that.Or I tell myself I’m past that.I think about the medical board.Anonymous complaints.His malpractice history—two other incidents before Emily, both settled quietly, both buried under paperwork and professional courtesy.
I think about ruining him slowly.The way he ruined me.Piece by piece.Let him sit in the wreckage and never know it was me, the way I never knew that morning when Emily grabbed my phone off the counter and saidI’ll run it up to you, it’s no trouble—I never knew that was the last time I’d hear her voice and that the man who silenced it was already on the road, already closing his eyes, already drifting across the yellow line into the rest of my life.
Just not today.Maybe tomorrow.That’s what I tell myself every time.
I pull away from the curb.Drive the rest of the way home.
The house is dark.It’s always dark.A three-bedroom ranch on three acres, nothing special, the kind of place a single man buys when he doesn’t want to explain why he can’t live in the house his wife died driving away from.I bought it six months after the funeral.Paid cash from the insurance settlement Emily’s parents pursued and won without asking me.
The porch light’s out.I should fix it.I fix everyone else’s.
Inside, the walls are bare.Emily would hate it.Emily would have had art up the first week, plants on every surface, a throw pillow situation that would make a man question his sanity.
I drop my keys on the counter.Pull out my phone.Scroll.
There’s a short list.Not written down anywhere, just understood.Women who don’t ask questions, don’t stay for breakfast, don’t expect a text the next day.
Kate.Bartender at the Lamplighter.Divorced.Laughs too loud and doesn’t care.She’d come over tonight if I asked.
Danielle.Nurse at the urgent care in Millbrook.We hooked up twice last winter during an ice storm that knocked the power out.She brought candles.I didn’t read into it.
There’s a third.Rachel.But Rachel started texting me good morning three weeks ago and I stopped answering because good morning means something and I don’t have something to give.
I open Kate’s contact.Stare at it.
I think about Marin instead.The way she dismissed me at the top of those stairs without even turning around.The way she didn’t bat an eye when I told her I loved something I lost.The way her voice sounded on the phone two nights ago—lower, softer, like a door left open by accident.
I click the phone off.Set it on the counter.
Not tonight.
I pour bourbon into whatever glass is closest, sit on the couch, and turn on the TV.Some cop show.I don’t follow the plot.I just let the noise fill the room the way Emily used to fill the truck—restless, searching, never quite landing on the right frequency.
