This time, the door remained open.
Jamie painted beside her.
I helped choose the colors.
Owen stopped trying to control every detail.
On our anniversary, the four of us completed the final room together.
The miniature kitchen.
I placed a tiny figure near the table.
Molly, holding the wooden spoon she always waved while arguing.
Beside her, I placed another figure.
Me.
Not as I was now.
As I had been at seventeen, laughing beside my sister.
The cottage now stands in our living room inside a glass cabinet.
Sometimes I switch on the small lights inside and sit beside it after everyone has gone to bed.
It does not bring Molly back.
Nothing can.
But it reminds me grief is not a locked room people must avoid entering.
It is a place we can visit together.
Jamie still tells strangers too much.
Last month, he informed our dentist that Owen snores and that I sometimes eat chocolate in the pantry.
We no longer ask him to keep adult secrets.
Not even happy ones.
Especially not happy ones.
Because the day he pointed at Ivy in the supermarket, I believed my son had exposed an affair.
Instead, he exposed something else.
My husband’s fear of speaking openly about grief.
My own habit of hiding pain until every mystery looked like betrayal.
And the danger of calling silence protection simply because it comes wrapped as a surprise.
Owen had built me a way back to the home I lost.
