I’d folded it back the way it used to be. Crooked. Then I stopped. What the hell was I doing?
I let the blanket fall back into place and sank onto the couch, elbows on my knees, staring at the floor.
This was Elena’s house. That had been my shield. My excuse. My justification for keeping everything exactly as it was.
But Dani had been right. I wasn’t protecting Elena. I was preserving pain.
The realization cause my throat to tighten, and my breath to catch in my chest. For a second, the room felt even colder, the kind of chill that made my skin prickle and my hands ball into fists. I was trapped in my own stillness, the weight settling like stone beneath my ribs.
After Elena died, the world kept moving without permission. Harper had grown. Seasons changed. Work continued. People expected me to function like the ground hadn’t split open beneath my feet.
So I’d built rules; the curtains stayed closed, the furniture stayed put, and the photos stayed exactly where Elena left them. The house stayed dim and peaceful and untouched, as if I kept it that way, I could keep her too.
If nothing changed, then nothing was actually gone.
Except that wasn’t true. And I knew it.
I told myself it was about respect.
But in reality, it was about fear. Fear that letting anything shift meant admitting Elena wasn’t coming back. Fear that if I let light in, I’d have to see the empty places more clearly. But underneath all of that, there was something else—some dismissive piece of me, stubborn and uneasy, that wanted Harper to feel sunlight here. I wanted her to know warmth, even if I couldn’t bring myself to believe I deserved it yet.
Fear that wanting something new, someone new, meant I was betraying the life we never got to finish.
Dani hadn’t asked to replace Elena. She’d said it herself—had looked me straight in the eye and told me she knew she never could, never wanted to. And I’d still lashed out like she was a threat.
Because she was. But not to Elena, to the frozen version of my life I’d built to survive. My fingers drifted to the framed photo on the shelf, the glass cold under my touch. The image inside hadn’t changed for years: Elena mid-laugh, sunlight at her back, forever out of reach while everything else in the room felt stuck in place.
I stood and paced, dragging a hand through my hair. The house felt wrong now in a way it never had before. Not because it had changed, but because I could see how much it hadn’t.
Every corner felt paused, waiting for me to decide it was safe to live again.
I stopped in front of the hallway mirror. The guy staring back looked older than I felt—lines carved in around my eyes, jaw set like I was holding something back.
I’d accused Dani of meddling.
But she hadn’t touched anything without care. She hadn’t erased Elena. She hadn’t minimized her place in our lives. She’d just… opened the curtains.
Let the house breathe.
And I’d reacted like she’d torn something sacred down.
Because part of me had wanted to believe that if I stayed loyal enough to the past, I wouldn’t feel this pull toward the future.
Toward her.
I dropped into the chair by the window, the one Elena used to sit in with her coffee every morning. For years, I hadn’t touched it. Like sitting there would be some kind of trespass.
I sank into it now, the cushion worn just enough to remember her shape.
And that was the moment it hit me. I wasn’t just afraid of letting go of Elena, I was afraid of how much I wanted Dani.
The ease of her laughter in this house. The way she moved through the space like she belonged, not because she claimed it, but because she respected it. The way she talked to Harper was without treating her like something fragile or broken. The way she challenged me without trying to fix me.
The way she made me feel like the man I was before grief became my defining trait.
I hated that my heart could even lean in that direction. Hated that part of me felt lighter around her. Hated that when she left, the house felt emptier than it ever had before.
She’d said it wasn’t fair, she was right. It wasn’t fair to Harper. And it sure as hell wasn’t fair to Dani.
