“What do you mean?” I asked.
My voice sounded weak. Smaller than I remembered.
Daniel did not move. He stood with one hand resting against the wall, dressed in a dark sweater and jeans, his jaw tight, his eyes red in a way that told me he had not slept much. Daniel had never liked me completely, but he had always been civil. He was a mechanic, practical, quiet, the kind of man who said little because he believed words were only useful when they fixed something.
That night, he looked at me like I was something too broken to repair.
“I mean she’s gone,” he said.
My stomach dropped.
“Gone where?”
He gave a short, humorless breath. “That’s the first thing you ask?”
“What else am I supposed to ask?”
“You could start with whether she’s alive.”
The room tilted.
The envelope in my hand bent under my fingers. I looked again at the wheelchair in the living room, at the crumpled blanket, at the untouched medication tray. For ten days I had imagined nothing. I had forced myself to imagine nothing. Not Lauren struggling to reach a glass of water. Not Lauren calling my name in the empty house. Not Lauren staring at the front door, waiting for footsteps that never came.
Now every image attacked me at once.
“Is she?” I whispered.
Daniel’s face changed. Not softened exactly, but something in it shifted, as if my fear had arrived too late to mean anything.
“Yes,” he said. “She’s alive.”
The relief hit so hard I had to put one hand on the back of the sofa.
Alive.
The word should have saved me. Instead, it only opened another door to fear.
“Then where is she?”
Daniel looked toward the kitchen table, where the papers were spread in neat, damning piles. “Read the letter.”
“I’m asking you.”
“And I’m telling you to read what your wife wrote before she left this house.”
Before she left.
The phrase made no sense. Lauren could not leave without help. She could barely stand without me supporting her on one side. The idea of her simply leaving the house while I was away felt like a cruel trick.
I lowered my eyes to the envelope.
My name looked the way it always had in her handwriting—careful, slanted slightly to the right, the letters pressed firmly into the paper. She used to leave notes on the refrigerator for me before the accident. Don’t forget your presentation folder. I made soup for dinner. Good luck today. Love, L.
There had been a time when coming home to her handwriting made me smile.
Now it felt like a hand closing around my throat.
I pulled out the folded pages. There were three of them.
The first line blurred before I could read it.
Marcus,
By the time you find this, I will already be somewhere you cannot reach me by walking down the hall and saying my name.
I stopped.
My hand shook once, hard enough to rattle the paper.
Daniel said nothing.
I forced myself to continue.
I waited for you for two days before I understood you were not coming home early. I waited through the third day because I told myself you must have been delayed, busy, overwhelmed, anything other than the truth my heart already knew.
On the fourth day, I stopped waiting.
Not because I stopped loving you.
