There’s something unsettling about watching people grieve loudly for someone you loved quietly.They hold your hands too long. Call you sweetheart like they’ve known you your whole life. Speak in that careful, hushed tone reserved for people they assume are fragile with sorrow.Michael died five days ago. Pancreatic cancer. Swift. Cruel. Seventy-eight years old, and then—just gone.“You meant the world to him, Clover,” someone whispered, squeezing my hand as if I might drift away.I nodded. I thanked them. I meant it. But nothing really landed.I stood beside the urn and the framed photo of Michael squinting into sunlight, a streak of grease across his cheek. That picture had lived on his nightstand for years. Now it felt like a placeholder—an inadequate substitute for the man who taught me how to change a tire and sign my name like it mattered.You left me here… alone,” I murmured to the photo.

Michael met my mother, Carina, when I was two. They married quietly. I don’t remember life before him. My earliest memory is sitting on his shoulders at the county fair, one hand sticky from cotton candy, the other tangled in his hair.My mom died when I was four. That sentence has followed me my entire life.When Michael fell ill last year, I moved back home without thinking twice. I cooked for him, drove him to every appointment, sat beside him when the pain made him fall silent. Not because I felt obligated.Because he was my dad in every way that counted.After the funeral, the house filled with polite condolences and the clatter of dishes. Someone laughed too loudly in the kitchen. A fork scraped sharply across porcelain.I stood in the hallway holding a glass of lemonade I hadn’t tasted. The house still carried his scent—wood polish, aftershave, and faint lavender soap he always insisted wasn’t his.Aunt Sammie slipped up beside me.