The moment I saw my late mother’s lake house, I didn’t call the police. I turned around, drove home, and waited to hear one sentence that changed my marriage forever.
The lake house sat at the end of a gravel road my mother used to sweep by hand every summer, as if the driveway itself deserved dignity. Two years after cancer took her, I still drove out there most weekends to water her garden and dust the cups she had lined up in the kitchen. It was a small place, but every stitch in every embroidered pillow on that couch was hers.
My name is Claire. I am thirty-seven, and that house is the last real piece of my mother I have left.
« The lake house isn’t sitting empty. »
At home, my husband Daniel had been quieter than usual that spring. He kept mentioning things in an offhand way that never quite landed lightly.
