Steve finished it just weeks before the cancer took him.
It was the last gift he left us.
I dried a plate and let myself remember him standing right there, sweat on his brow, grinning as he told me the kids would love it.
“You built them a whole summer,” I had said to him back then.
It was the last gift he left us.
“I built us a memory,” he had answered.
Now those memories rippled across the water every single day.
My youngest waved at me, and I waved back.
For a moment, everything felt whole again.
Grief and joy could live in the same backyard, I had learned.
Then my eyes drifted toward the fence line, toward Katherine’s house next door.
Grief and joy could live in the same backyard
She was standing at her window, watching.
Not glancing.
Watching, with that pinched, calculating expression I had come to know too well.
