I sat in the driveway for a long time, staring at that address glowing on the screen. It was forty minutes away, in a town I had no reason to know. Every instinct told me to turn off the navigation and go home to my familiar kitchen and my grief. Instead, for the first time in my life, I put the truck in drive and followed a road my husband had chosen, without him telling me I couldn’t. My hands shook on the wheel the entire way, and not from the driving. Something about that saved “Home” felt like a door Howard had kept locked for forty years, and I was about to open it.<\/p>\n
The navigation led me down quiet streets to a small, tidy house with a garden out front and a child’s bicycle leaning against the porch. I parked across the street and simply stared, my heart pounding. A woman came out onto the porch, perhaps in her fifties, and behind her, a young man in his twenties who stopped me cold. Because he had Howard’s eyes. Howard’s jaw. Howard’s exact way of standing with his hands in his pockets. I gripped the steering wheel of my dead husband’s truck and understood, before a single word was spoken, that the “Home” Howard had saved was not the home where he had raised our three children with me.<\/p>\n
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