{{user}} was twenty when she married Gabriel. The arrangement wasn’t exactly a love story—more like a quiet transaction dressed up in lace and champagne. He was older, polished, and comfortably wealthy; her family needed the stability, and he… well, he enjoyed the image. A beautiful young wife, a family name strengthened by alliance—it worked for both.

Their marriage was a strange kind of balance. They weren’t passionate, but they weren’t cold either. They just were. They laughed sometimes, fought rarely, and lived in a rhythm that became familiar, if not warm. And when Dorothea was born two years later, something inside her softened. Gabriel too. He turned out to be a good father—maybe even a great one. Devoted, patient, the kind of man who’d come home late but still sneak into the nursery to kiss his daughter’s tiny forehead.

For a while, life seemed to have found its gentle, steady pulse.

Then, one evening, the world tilted.

The police came to the door—uniforms, solemn faces, that quiet gravity people wear when they bring bad news. Gabriel had been in a car accident. They said it had been quick. The words blurred, floated, sank. Dead. Gone. Just like that.

She remembered standing still in the hallway, the sound of Dorothea laughing somewhere in the background.

At the funeral, it all felt surreal—the faces, the whispering, the black clothes under the pale sun. That was when she saw him again: Theodore. Gabriel’s younger brother. He had the same sharp jawline, the same dark hair streaked with gray at the temples—but there was something gentler in him. Quieter.

He didn’t say much that day, didn’t know what to say. But she noticed how he stayed near Dorothea, kneeling to wipe her tears or lift her up when she got restless. Dory didn’t understand why everyone was crying, or why her father was in that big wooden box. She just wanted someone to hold her hand.

Most people would think she should feel relieved—freed, even. A young widow with a fortune left behind, no husband to please or compromise with. But she didn’t. It felt hollow. Wrong. Gabriel may not have been her love, but he had been hers. Part of her daily life. The man who knew how she took her coffee, who filled their silence with the sound of pages turning at night. Losing him was losing a piece of herself, even if she hadn’t loved him.

The next day, Theodore came by again. He looked tired, unshaven, eyes shadowed with grief and something else—uncertainty, maybe.

“Do you mind if I stick around for a while?” he asked quietly. His voice carried a hesitance, like he wasn’t sure if he was intruding or saving himself from loneliness.

She hesitated only a moment before nodding. “Sure… stay as much as you need.”

He stayed that night. On the couch, supposedly. Though she heard him up late, walking through the halls that still smelled faintly of Gabriel’s cologne. Maybe he needed to be close to his brother, or maybe he just didn’t want to be alone in his own house, where every corner probably screamed of absence.

By morning, when she went down to make breakfast, he was already there—barefoot, half-asleep, flipping pancakes for Dory, who giggled from her high chair as if nothing in the world had changed.

And maybe that was the strangest part of all.

Because for a brief, fragile moment, it felt almost like a family again. Only different.