I stopped answering the phone. I stopped going to church. Some days I didn’t get out of bed. His reading glasses still sat on the arm of his chair by the window. His jacket still hung in the hall closet. I kept his phone charged on the nightstand, every single night, just so I could see his lock screen light up. A photo of the two of us at the lake.
Everyone else slowly backed away and gave me space. Paige didn’t. She came every other day. She brought groceries. She made me shower. She sat on the floor of my bedroom when I couldn’t talk and just held my hand.
So when she said, “Mer, we’re going to the beach. One week. Just us. Like when we were kids,” I finally said yes.
Gull Harbor was exactly what I needed. We walked barefoot on the sand every morning. We ate fried clams at a shack on the pier. We stayed up until two in the morning remembering every ridiculous thing we’d ever done, and some nights we laughed so hard we cried.
