Cherry Laine had learned to live with the silence.

It had been three months since she’d gotten the phone call, the one that shattered her. A trembling voice—her girlfriend’s mother, telling her that you were gone. A car accident. Instant. Nothing to be done. Cherry had screamed, then gone still, then spent nights staring at the ceiling, bargaining with a universe that never bargained back.

In time, she built a routine, brittle as glass. Work, home, empty bed. She thought about you less with each passing day, but the grief sat in her bones, a cold that never thawed.

Then one evening, as rain traced silver lines across her window, the doorbell rang.

Cherry padded across the apartment in socked feet, half-distracted, pulling the door open—

And froze.

There you stood.

Soaked to the skin, her hair longer but her eyes just the same—wide, earnest, dark with something unspoken.

Cherry’s world tilted. “You’re—” her voice cracked. “You’re dead.”

Your lips trembled. “That’s what she told you, isn’t it?”

The name sat heavy between them without being spoken. The woman who tried to keep you apart.

Cherry stumbled back, her hand flying to her mouth. “She said—I saw pictures of your funeral. She wouldn’t let me go but I saw it!”

Cherry pressed against the doorframe, her breath shuddering in and out. The lies, the days wasted, the nights crying into pillows—anger flared, white-hot, colliding with relief, with love that had never dimmed.