Last month, I buried the man who chose me when I was just three years old. He gave me his name, his love, and everything a daughter could ever hope for. Then, three days after the funeral, an envelope appeared in his mailbox—one that would shake everything I believed about the night my parents died.
Thomas’s house felt wrong without him.
He was my dad. And he had been a great Dad.
Everything inside remained exactly as it always had been. His reading glasses still rested neatly on the side table. His coffee mug—the ugly one I’d painted in third grade with uneven flowers—sat on the kitchen counter, right where he’d left it.
But despite all of that, the house felt hollow. Like a stage where all the props were still in place, but the only person who had ever brought them to life had simply walked away.
I had come there to start packing his things. Three days after burying him, I still hadn’t managed to put a single item into a box.
I stood in the living room, holding an empty cardboard box, staring blankly at his bookshelf—until something outside the front window caught my attention and froze me in place.
A woman.
She looked to be in her late 50s, wearing a dark coat and a scarf pulled high around her jaw. She moved quickly toward the mailbox at the end of the front path.
She paused for a moment, glanced back at the house, slid something inside, and turned to leave.
Something about her movement made my stomach tighten.
