They buried my husband in a closed casket. I was eight months pregnant when I watched them lower him into the ground.
No one would let me see his face.
They said the crash had been too severe. They said I should remember him the way he was, as if memory could ever compete with a coffin.
No one would let me see his face.
By the next morning, the baby I was carrying stopped fighting, too.
In less than 48 hours, everything we had planned… was gone.
Now, three years later, I lived in a third-floor apartment in a different city with blank walls and no photographs. I worked at a dental office, answered phones, scheduled cleanings, and came home to silence.
The baby I was carrying stopped fighting.
I told myself I had chosen this apartment because it had large windows and decent lighting, but the truth was that I chose it because it had no memories attached to it.
I survived by refusing to look backward.
Until the banging started.
I survived.
It was a Sunday afternoon.
I was rinsing a plate when something scraped loudly against the stairwell wall outside. A man’s voice said, “Careful with the corner,” followed by a soft laugh from a woman.
I wiped my hands and looked out the window.
A young family was moving in. A dark-haired woman directed the movers while holding a clipboard. A little girl, no older than eighteen months, toddled near the steps with a pink stuffed rabbit clutched in her fist.
A man lifted the end of a couch and maneuvered it through the doorway with practiced ease.
A young family was moving in.
For a brief moment, something twisted in my chest.
That could have been Ron and me.
Then the man glanced up toward my window, and my entire body went cold.
He had Ron’s signature haircut, Ron’s eyes, and mouth; he could have been a slightly aged version of my husband.
The resemblance was so exact that it didn’t feel like coincidence.
It felt like a cruel echo.
Something twisted in my chest.
I stepped back from the window and knocked a glass onto the floor.
“That’s impossible, Katie. Get it together,” I whispered.
Footsteps echoed up the stairwell, slow and heavy. I stepped into the hallway before I could talk myself out of it.
