That was different.
They walked back to the car.
Ryan turned once as though expecting me to call him back.
I did not.
I closed the door.
Then I leaned against it and shook so hard I had to sit on the floor.
Strength, I learned, can arrive before peace.
Sometimes your body does the frightening thing first and processes it afterward.
I cried there for ten minutes.
Then I stood up and made tea in the small electric kettle I had bought because my stove had not yet been returned.
The house was still mostly empty.
But it no longer felt erased.
It felt protected.
The next morning, I drove to the storage unit.
The brass key turned with a stiff click.
Inside were pieces of my life in uneven rows.
The two wingback chairs.
My grandmother’s bookcase.
Six boxes of dishes.
Three framed photographs.
Tom’s leather jacket.
A bundle of his flannel shirts tied with twine because the estate dealer had grouped them as “vintage menswear.”
I pressed my face into the top shirt and cried until the fabric smelled like dust instead of him.
Not everything had been recovered.
The wedding crystal had gone to an out-of-state buyer before I found the listing.
The coffee table was somewhere in Nebraska.
Several family albums were missing.
The refrigerator had already been installed in another house.
The stove was at a resale warehouse awaiting pickup.
The piano was the hardest.
