Chapter 2 — Forty-Eight Hours

That evening I sat in the living room of the house I’d called home for thirty years while movers carried away furniture my wife had chosen and my son had already claimed.

The grandfather clock. The china cabinet. The walnut sideboard from Helen’s aunt. The cream sofa we bought after Bradley left for college, when Helen finally wanted something “grown-up.”

Everything had been labeled, wrapped, or boxed. Bradley had arranged it all before the funeral flowers finished fading.

I took our wedding photograph off the mantel before a mover could pack it. Helen wore a satin dress she’d bought secondhand and altered herself. I stood beside her in a rented tuxedo, smiling like the luckiest fool in Ohio.

We were twenty-five and twenty-eight, sunburned from our honeymoon at Lake Michigan, broke enough to count every restaurant bill, and happier than we knew how to protect.

When had that woman become someone who secretly owned a cabin, left our son a villa, and handed me nothing but keys to peeling paint and salt air? Or had I become the stranger first?