“The note was already there, tucked under the single stem he’d come to lay, ink bleeding a little in the cold.

This wasn’t the script.

Every Sunday, same road, long before the town yawned awake. He rolled to the far corner by muscle memory, shut off the engine, set one flower beneath the maple where she slept, said nothing, left.

But not today.

Today there was paper under the stem like a small secret, folded into a tight square he felt before he saw.

He cracked it open with stiff fingers.

“YOU’RE NOT ALONE. I SEE YOU EVERY WEEK.”

My stomach went hollow. Heat in my face, cold in my hands.

The handwriting was careful. Not pretty. Careful, like it didn’t want to be caught.

So someone had been there. Watching my quiet load-out of grief. My route. My promise. Week after week after week.

I looked up at the branches. Leaves the color of warning lights. My bike clicked as it cooled.

Then what?

I slid the note into my jacket, stepped back, and didn’t leave. I stood by the stone. I listened. Every small sound turned sharp.

Minutes stretched. Wind worked the grass. A crow laughed like it knew something.

Then a dry rustle. Not wind. Footsteps. Closer, then stopping.

My chest thumped against my zipper. I could feel each beat in my neck.

A figure eased out from behind the autumn leaves, slow, like I might scare. Breath in the cold. Hands visible. No sudden moves.

I remember the way the world got quiet right there. The way my name sounded when I finally heard it again.

And what I did next, and who it was, still ride with me every time I pass that gold tree.

(continued in the comments)”

He said my name like a question and a memory at once.

“Cal?”

I hadn’t heard it in that exact shape in a long time, like paper creasing right down the middle.

He was older than me by a decade at least, with a coat that had seen more winters than bodies, and a cap pulled low that couldn’t hide the tired in his eyes.

I didn’t know him. Or I did and my brain refused.

He took one step, then another, and stopped with the maple trunk between us like a thin excuse.

“I’m Graham,” he said, and watched my face, like the name might land somewhere for me.

The name hit an old headline in my head, the one I’d never saved and never needed to read twice.

I felt my hands turn into fists inside my riding gloves without telling them to.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said, and my voice had grit I didn’t plan.

He nodded once, like he’d already said it to himself a thousand times.

“I know,” he said, and lifted both palms, empty. “But I am.”

The crow took off, noisy, as if to make sure the whole hill knew.

I stepped to the stone and put my back to it, like I could cover her name with my body.

He looked at the flower, at the dirt, at the picture we’d had etched small in the corner where my hair still had sun in it and her laugh lines were real.

He closed his eyes like it hurt.

“I wrote the note because I keep seeing you,” he said, careful the way the handwriting had been. “And I didn’t know how else to tell you that you weren’t doing this alone.”

I thought about the Sunday he was talking about and then all the Sundays. I thought about me in my jacket with my routine like a leash.

“You see me,” I said, and it came out flat. “Every week.”

He swallowed and nodded. “I live two streets over,” he said. “I cut through here on my way to the bakery. I haven’t missed you once.”

I wanted to tell him to go to a different bakery, a different route, a different town.

I wanted to say I would buy all the bread in all the bakeries for him except this one.

“Why,” I said, and it barely formed. “Why watch me.”

He took in the tree, the stone, the way the light came through patchy and cold that morning.

“Because I did this,” he said, and even the wind paused.

My jaw did something tight and mean.

“It was an accident,” he added, like a line from the report, but his voice broke the word in half. “That’s what the court said. That’s what the weather said. That’s what the skid marks said. But I still did it.”

I saw the photo from the article in my head, the mangled grill, the crooked stop sign, the ugly glare of flash on a cold road.

I kept my feet where they were by thinking about concrete.

He tried on a smile and threw it away. “I wanted to say I’m sorry,” he said, and that was it, those words in the air with our steam.

“Now?” I said, and the word scraped. “After a year?”

He flinched like I’d thrown something.

“I tried,” he said, soft. “I wrote you once. I went to the service and stood outside by the elm, and I saw you carry her picture with both hands, and I didn’t know how to walk into that.”

The corners of the stone pressed into me through my jacket.

“I couldn’t look at you,” I said, and the truth of that surprised me.

“I know,” he said, and rubbed his thumb across his palm like he was wiping off something he couldn’t see. “But I saw you here. And I kept thinking if there were any air left after my apology, maybe I could put it in your lungs for a minute.”

That line landed somewhere I didn’t want to be soft.

I looked down at the base of the stone where the grass had grown patchy and I’d tried to trim it with scissors once like the kind of care that could fix anything.

I could taste the grit of the road that day two falls ago, the way time had bent, the exploded quiet, the phone ringing and ringing and me not able to hold the world still enough to hear.

“I screamed at the paramedic,” I said out of nowhere, and he blinked. “I asked him if my wife had said anything at the scene before they took her, like the movies, like some last line that would fix every wrong thing I ever did or thought of doing.”

He clicked his teeth gently like a habit to keep words from spilling.

“What did he say,” he asked, careful to leave me room.

“He said she asked where I was,” I said, and I had to breathe and forget and remember at the same time.

His face folded in on itself for a second like a letter you decide not to send.

“I wanted to be there,” he said, and his voice did not ask me to forgive him for that.

I looked at him hard enough to see the rest of him.

He had creek water eyes and coffee breath and a scar at his temple like a tiny question mark.

He was just a man who had to live after doing something he would never be finished doing.

“I sent the last text,” I said, and the words came out like I had been holding them under my tongue too long. “She was late, and I told her to grab milk on the way home, and to hurry because the game was about to start.”

His eyes lifted like the smallest bird.

“I didn’t know that,” he said, and he didn’t move.

“I never told anybody,” I said, and the world shifted under my boots. “Police saw phone records and asked, and I nodded, and then I went home and put my head on the kitchen table and counted to a thousand slow.”

Some of the hardness in my throat loosened and it felt like shame walking out of a room and not closing the door.

He made this sound like a cupboard opening and closing.

“I looked away for a second because my son called me from the back seat,” he said, and the air went thinner. “He dropped his juice box and it was leaking onto the seat and he didn’t want to sit in a puddle, and I reached, and that was it. That was the second I borrowed and never paid back.”

I saw it like a dumb little movie in my head, ordinary, kind, stupid, human.

“You had your kid in the car,” I said, and he nodded.

“He was four then,” he said. “He’s five now and thinks the bakery is his because they give him a sugar cookie every Sunday without charging me for it.”

He said it like a confession he needed to empty out alongside the big one.

We stood there and counted our seconds together like small paper coins.

The maple did their slow gasp in the wind like it was feeling it with us.

“Why the note,” I said after we’d stood long enough to feel stupid and brave, and he blinked a little.

“I had to say it somehow,” he said. “I tried talking to you once from across the grass, but I felt like a thief. The note was so you’d know someone else saw the same piece of time every week and knew what it was.”

I took it back out of my pocket and read it again like it might say something different now.

YOU’RE NOT ALONE. I SEE YOU EVERY WEEK.

I thought about alone and every week and how those two can become a brand on your skin.

“I came ready to hit you,” I said, and that sounded like a joke to my ears, and not to his.

He nodded like he’d been hit before and would survive this too.

“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’ve let people swing and I stood still for it once in a parking lot when a guy recognized my truck because of the dent and the man said he had a right and I had no answer.”

A squirrel ran up the trunk above us and tested a branch with two trusting hops.

“I can’t forgive you yet,” I said, and we both blinked at the honesty, because it wasn’t a big movie speech, it was a weather forecast.

He looked like he’d expected something else and also exactly this.

“Then let me do something I can do,” he said, and he took a breath like he was stepping into cold water. “The crosswalk at Oak and Broad is a mess. It doesn’t have a flashing sign, and the town says they can’t afford one.”

I knew that corner too well, where she had stopped, where he had skidded, where everything had bent.

“I have a crew that can install it,” he said, and I looked at him because I didn’t peg him as a crew kind of guy. “I do electrical. For the county. I can do it the right way for cost. Or free. I can pull the permit through my boss and take the heat. You don’t have to say my name on any plaque.”

I let the idea sit near us the way a dog sits near a table waiting for somebody to drop something.

“You want to put a flashing sign where you—” I started and stopped because the sentence hurt my teeth.

“I want fewer seconds borrowed,” he said, and that was it, and something unclenched again inside me.

We stood there with the maple above us and something starting to sound like a plan and not just a grief ritual.

“Her name was Mara,” I said, because it mattered to say her name without the word “accident” attached. “She taught art at the elementary school on Maple Street. She made third graders love pastels.”

He smiled at that like he could see a kid holding up a messy sun to a classroom.

“I never knew her name until now,” he said, and I tried to imagine him carrying all that weight around nameless, a ghost with no tag.

I looked down at the dates on the stone like they were a math problem that never added up.

“Call me Cal again,” I said, and his face did this tiny flick like a lamp finding current. “It sounded like a person when you said it.”

“Cal,” he said, slow and grateful, like he was tasting it.

We lingered there for a while without needing to move immediately, which was new and odd and felt like a small gift and also a loan I could pay back.

He told me he went to the bakery because the owner had fed him for a week when his wife first left him, long before the accident, and he had never been able to stop paying that debt with sugar and kindness.

I told him I still slept on my side of the bed, and moved my hand to her pillow in the night out of habit like a homing pigeon that forgot it was a bird.

He told me his son liked trucks and asked questions like “Where do stairs go when they stop going up,” and I laughed because I could hear the boy say it.

We both kept an eye on the path like the cemetery might get crowded, and it didn’t.

Before we walked away, because we had to at some point, he reached into his pocket and took out another folded square.

“I wrote something else,” he said, nervous like a kid with a handmade Valentine. “It’s for you, to read later if you want, not here if here is complicated.”

I took it and didn’t look at it, because it wasn’t about words, it was about someone who was a part of the worst day trying to not make every day after that part of it too.

We walked to the lot together, each on our own side of the path like we were carrying different kinds of fragile.

His truck was the same make as in the photo and that surprised me, because I guess I thought he would throw it into a lake.

He put his hand on the door and looked back like he might ask for something impossible, and then he didn’t.

“If you hate me tomorrow, I won’t come back,” he said, like an oath. “If you don’t, if you want the sign, I’ll be around.”

I nodded once, because that was all I had right then.

He drove away slow, which felt like a promise too, and I sat on my bike and watched the exhaust run into the morning.

I didn’t leave right away.

I held the second note and the first and looked at her name and felt a thing I hadn’t felt in months that I only later decided was air.

Back home, the house did its gut familiar quiet, the one where you can hear the fridge hum like it’s trying to be your friend.

I put the note on the table and made coffee I didn’t really want and stood with my palms flat while it dripped, like you do when the future is a stalker and the past is your landlord.

When I finally opened the note, I read it three times.

“I keep thinking I traded my seconds for yours,” it said in smaller, freer letters than the first. “I know it doesn’t work like that, and that I can’t give her back by taking something from myself, but I keep wanting to. If you need a thing lifted or a porch painted or a room emptied of whatever hurts to look at, I’ll come.”

I looked around at the house and saw it like someone else might see it.

The coat she wore hanging like it was waiting for a person.

The mug with a hairline craze she liked because it caught tea leaves like confetti.

Her sketchbook open on the coffee table to a page with a three-minute sketch of my left ear that she thought was beautiful.

I took the sketchbook and sat down and let my face go where it wanted.

I didn’t call anyone that day, not Graham, not my mother, not my boss.

But I did a thing I hadn’t done and went through the junk drawer and threw away the batteries that were too dead to save and the coupons that had expired last January.

I put the spare keys on their hook and lined up the pens and felt a small click in my middle, like the sound the bike makes when it cools.

On Monday, I went to the school and met the principal and asked if we could talk about the crosswalk.

She said she had already sent three emails and had a denial form letter in her desk and a real knot in her stomach.

I told her about the worker who could install it and do it properly and how we could raise money for materials or find it under some other budget.

She looked at me with that look people give you when they can see you want to stand in the middle of the street until something moves.

She brought in the PTA president, a man with a bald head and a soft voice, and together we made a list of the boring things that make big things possible.

Permits. Board meetings. Forms. Signatures. People who don’t want flashing lights outside their house and say things on Facebook about property values.

At night, when the house was too much like a museum, I wrote to Graham.

I said yes to the sign.

I said I didn’t hate him yet and might tomorrow, and that he should be ready for that like weather, like how you bring an umbrella not because you plan to use it but because it keeps storms away.

He answered simple.

Ready.

We met on a Tuesday at the corner where everything had happened, and it looked like any corner in any small town until it didn’t.

He had a clipboard and a thermos and a gaggle of men in safety vests who all looked at me the way you look at a person at a graveside.

We measured and chalked and set cones and they laughed about a joke I didn’t hear them say but I saw the edges of its kind.

I brought coffee from the bakery and the baker’s wife hugged my cup-holding hand and told me she had been waiting to hug me without breaking me.

It took weeks and then a month and then another, because everything that isn’t a crisis happens slow.

We gave the crosswalk a light that flashed like a heartbeat you could see from far away.

On the day we tested it, the principal cried and the soft voiced PTA man stood with his kid on his shoulders and clapped once and then put his hand over his mouth.

Graham looked at the light and then at me and his eyes did something like morning when it stops being night if you look at it long enough.

“Thank you,” he said, like I had done him a favor, and I didn’t have a word for whatever I felt.

We put a tiny plaque because the PTA insisted, but we wrote the words carefully.

In memory of all the seconds we borrow and return.

No names.

No dates.

Just the quiet math of living.

Winter came and draped the town in the kind of cold that makes you honest or cruel, and I went to the maple each Sunday and put down a stem and sometimes he was there already and sometimes he wasn’t.

We learned how to share a hill.

We learned how to stand together and also apart.

Sometimes we talked about stupid things, like the bakery’s new almond thing that flaked like fake snow on your coat, or the way the town plow always missed the same corner and left this one insulting pillow of snow you had to kick through.

Once, in January, when the sky was a lid and the ground had cracked and my breath just hung in front of me like a ghost, he came alone with a small shovel.

He scraped the stone clear of ice with these careful strokes like a barber shaving someone asleep.

“Can I tell you something,” I said, and he looked up and nodded because we had learned how to say yes without touching all the time.

“I was going to leave,” I said, and the sound of it in the cold was a truth I had to address right then. “Before it happened. I had a bag under the bed with a pair of jeans and a toothbrush and a stupid shirt, and I was going to go to my brother’s in Hudson and stay until I had an excuse not to come back.”

He set the shovel down like it might break if he held it.

“She knew,” he said, like a guess and a fact at once. “Didn’t she.”

I nodded and the heat in my neck was worse than the cold in my fingers.

“She left me a note,” I said, and my mouth went dry because I hadn’t said that note out loud to anyone. “I found it in the bookcase in a novel she said I should read, and it said she had done the math too, and that she wanted me to tell the truth at least once a day even if it wasn’t to her.”

I watched a blackbird land on the sign across the street and pump its head like it was listening.

“We weren’t unhappy,” I said. “We were just tired and wrong and two people who had said yes to too many things we didn’t want to do anymore.”

He took this in like a man who needed the calories.

“Her last word wasn’t me,” I said, and he looked at me sharp and kind. “It was ‘milk,’ and I have hated that word for a year.”

We both let that sit with the empty space around it until it didn’t echo anymore.

“Tell one truth today,” he said, like he was borrowing her voice for a second, and looked at me with a little sideways smile. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and it felt like drinking cold water when you’re not sure you like water anymore.

Spring rolled over the town as if pushing a slow heavy thing with two hands, and I started to see my neighbors on their porches again, and everyone seemed softer around the edges like snow does when it gives up.

The kids at the school drew the crosswalk in crayon and sent pictures to the town page, and people fought in the comments for three posts and then stopped because they were bored or because kindness was more interesting for a minute.

I went back to work part-time and I took the long way the first month because the short way drove me through the intersection, and then I took the short way because the long way was tiring, and then I stopped keeping track.

In June, the principal asked me to come to the school because they had something they said I would like.

I went to the art room where the smell of glue is permanent, and I stood where she had stood with a blue apron tied loosely and a pencil stuck in her bun like it lived there.

They had cleared a corner near the window, and there was a new cabinet for supplies and two fresh stools and a brass plate that said The Mara Corner in a kid’s handwriting.

A third grader with a gap in her teeth told me they named it that because it made them feel like sitting there was like sitting closer to the sun.

I signed my name in the teacher guest book and wrote “Thank you for making a place that knows her,” and the principal cried again and we both pretended it was because of the onion in the cafeteria.

I took home a clay turtle a kid had left on the windowsill with no name and put it on my windowsill like a little ambassador.

Graham sent me a picture that afternoon of his son under the new crosswalk light, pointing at it like he had invented light, with a cookie in his other hand.

He wrote “He calls it Mara’s light now,” and I sat on the kitchen floor and put my head on my knees and stayed there until the stove clock clicked to the next minute.

Summer brought heat that stuck to your collar and made bikes too much some days, and I drove sometimes instead and let the windows be my air.

I still went on Sundays, a stem each time, but it was different.

Not less.

Different like a healed bone aches when it rains.

On a Wednesday in August, my brother called me, the one I would have run to, the one who sent me dumb videos of people falling off jet skis like medicine.

He said a developer wanted to knock down the old dance hall on Front where we had taken her once for a fake swing class and ended up drinking seltzer on the curb and laughing at our feet.

He asked me if I was up for a meeting to argue against it, and for the first time in months I didn’t try to find a way around having to be anywhere.

We went and argued and the councilwoman said the roof was bad and the taxes were worse and that “sentiment” wasn’t on the line item anywhere.

I stood up and talked about how we make space for memory even when we can’t afford chandeliers, and I was weirdly steady.

After, in the parking lot, a woman with hair like a dandelion in seed asked me if I was the one with the crosswalk, and I said I wasn’t, not alone, and that there were a lot of hands under that light.

She said she had been at the accident that day, the day, because she was walking her dog and was the one who had called 911 while everyone danced around not doing it because they were waiting for someone else to be brave.

She said she thought of my wife when she stopped at the sign and when she crossed she put her hand on her dog’s head and said, “We go now,” like a prayer.

I don’t remember what I said back, but I remember that night I slept without waking at three to check the front door lock like I had won a job I never wanted.

Fall came again, and the maple did its alarm light color, and the hill smelled like the inside of a leaf pile.

We stood there one Sunday, me and the man who killed her and the man I was trying not to be anymore, and we watched a little kid run between stones and count numbers he could not read yet.

“I haven’t dreamed about the accident in a month,” he said, like he was surprised and trying not to scare the words.

“I still say her name when I’m alone,” I said, and he nodded because he did too, I could see it.

“My kid starts kindergarten next week,” he said, and then a laugh that was more breath than sound. “He asks if the sign will blink for him, just for him, if he looks at it the right way.”

I smiled because that is exactly what a five-year-old would think.

“It will,” I said, and I meant it.

The bakery put a donation jar by the register with a piece of tape that said Seconds Jar in a child’s marker, and people put in quarters and folded bills and, once, their wedding ring, which they came back for later because love is complicated and kind.

We used that money and a quiet check from a woman who never gave her name to start a scholarship at the school for any kid who wanted to make a thing and needed a thing to make it with.

Paints.

Clay.

Macaroni.

The note on the classroom bulletin board told the kids to tell the truth to their art once a day, and I liked that so much I stole it and put it on my fridge.

Winter again, when your breath is a ghost and the roads make you cautious, and the memorials in town get that layer of snow that makes them look like cake.

We had a year under the light.

No accidents at the corner.

No balloons tied to a pole that make your chest feel like glass for a week.

The crossing guard, a woman named Eileen who wore three scarves at once like armor, said it felt like the road learned to apologize.

On some Sunday I can’t date because grief makes your calendar wet and the ink runs, we had a short ceremony under the maple.

I had asked the principal if she wanted to do something for the year, and she said yes, and then we refused big speeches and cupcakes with faces on them.

We had people who could not sing sing anyway.

We had a kid read a poem about waiting at the edge of the road and feeling like a dog who is told to stay and then go.

We had a silence you could hear.

When it was done, Graham stood there with his hands in his coat like he was keeping them from doing something dumb.

He stepped closer to the stone, and I stepped back and let him, because that is a thing you let the present do to the past sometimes.

He took a breath that looked like a climb and said into the air, “I’m sorry,” in a voice that was not a headline and not a report and not a checklist item and not an action item either.

People pretended not to hear because they were kind, and also because they knew exactly what to do with those words.

After, as everyone drifted, he walked up to me and said, “I’m moving,” and I felt something in my chest do a weird little twist.

He said his ex-wife had found work in the next county and his son wanted to be closer to a cousin, and the rent here was bad and there was a porch there that didn’t sag.

I felt a flash of fear like I was being left behind in a new way, and then I realized this is what moving on looks like when it doesn’t look like a betrayal.

We hugged the way people who don’t hug hug, which is with a couple of taps on the back like we are sending messages in Morse code.

He said he would drive by the sign once a month to make sure it was still good, and I said I would text him if it went dark, which is a funny sentence if you look at it from a distance.

The Sunday after he left, I went anyway, because habits can be holy if they aren’t cages.

I laid down a stem and told her about the turtle on the windowsill and the kid who wrote me a thank you note in all caps for “THE GOOD LIGHT,” and I felt the kind of sad that isn’t a knife, more like a weather pattern.

As I stood, a woman in a yellow jacket with a red knit hat walked up slow with a little girl in a blue coat that made her look like a blueberry.

The woman hesitated the way people do when they are trying to be polite and brave in the same moment.

“Are you Cal,” she asked, and her voice was softer than the hat.

I nodded and wore whatever face people wear when they are seen.

“I’m Tessa,” she said, and smiled without too much tooth. “My daughter is Nora. We come on Wednesdays sometimes.”

I looked at the little girl, who had two candy canes sticking out of her pocket like antlers, and she waved with her whole arm.

“Hi,” Nora said, and then pulled a folded paper from the woman’s bag like a magician with a trick he has to practice.

“This was hers,” Tessa said, and held it out the way you hold ash.

I took it and felt the texture of something older than this morning.

It was one of Mara’s handouts from a workshop at the library two years before, the one she had done on drawing anything in five minutes with shapes.

At the bottom, in her handwriting in pencil because she never used pen for art, was a note.

If you found this, it means my mess made it out into the world and you picked it up. Thank you for seeing the good in scraps.

My throat did that hard thing again but kinder.

“She gave it to me after class,” Tessa said. “I was the one who cried because I couldn’t draw a circle without it looking like a potato.”

I laughed, and it felt like eating soup.

“She told me potato circles were honest,” Tessa said, and shook her head at the memory like it was a pet that did tricks. “I kept this in my car visor since then, and I found it yesterday when I cleaned the car because it smelled like stale fries.”

Nora tugged her sleeve and looked up with her blueberry face.

“Can I put my picture here,” Nora said, and held up a scribble that was all red and green and huge sun energy.

“Of course,” I said, and took it and slid it between the stone and the little brass holder where we sometimes kept programs or notes, and it looked like a small flag for a place that had decided to be kind.

After they left, I stood in the cold with my hands in my pockets and my heart doing something careful and repaired.

I walked to the bakery and the bell on the door said its sharp note and the baker’s wife said my name like people do who have been saying it a while.

There was a new jar on the counter that hadn’t been there last week.

The label was just four words, the ones on the plaque.

Borrowed And Returned Seconds.

I put two dollars in and then took them back out and folded them again and put them in, because sometimes doing something twice makes it realer in your hands.

I sat at the corner table and watched the world go by the window.

A kid in a dinosaur coat stomped at the crosswalk like it owed him an apology and then laughed when the light flashed.

A woman with a stroller did that half run you do when you’re crossing and you want to look like you’re giving effort even though you don’t have to, and she smiled at herself for it.

A man in a hat I recognized pulled over, got out, and checked the base of the pole, ran a hand around it like a mechanic touching a engine he likes, and then saw me and lifted his chin.

I lifted mine back, and that was enough.

I walked home by the long way because I wanted to see the river, and I stood on the little bridge and watched a pair of geese do the opposite of grace, and it made me feel better about my own moves.

When I got home, I took the bag from under the bed, the one with the jeans and the shirt and the toothbrush, and I emptied it on the floor.

I put the jeans back in the drawer and the shirt on a hanger and the toothbrush in the cup by the sink where all the brushes are a little sad and defiant.

I folded the bag and put it by the door with the recycling, and it felt like a thing that had been alive was now a thing that was over.

At dinner, I ate the soup I’d made and read the notes I’d stuck to the fridge out loud like a prayer to an ordinary god.

Tell the truth once a day.

See the good in scraps.

Borrowed and returned seconds.

It is strange how many of the biggest things are small words.

It is stranger still how many of the wide roads have a narrow piece early on that you have to cross eyes open, feet steady, forgiving the person you were on the other side and the person who is waiting for you here.

The maple will go gold again and again and again long after I stop going on Sundays, and somebody else will stand under it and find a note they didn’t expect.

I hope when they do, the words will be careful and kind and true, and I hope they sound like a name said by someone who has done the math and paid what they can.

That morning, I put my jacket on, stuck a new stem in my hand, and headed down the road.

The bike clicked as it cooled when I parked, the same as always, and everything else was new.

I walked to the stone and set the flower and touched the edge of the granite and said a truth that was small and not cinematic.

I’m still here.

And then I walked to the corner and I waited like you do when the world says wait, and when the light pulsed like a second hand you can see, I crossed.

If I learned anything over the last seasons, it was this.

You can’t steer what is gone, but you can keep your hands on what is here.

You can’t get back your borrowed seconds, but you can choose how you spend the ones you still have.

You can’t fix every mess, but you can see the good in scraps, and sometimes that’s what saves you.