Three years after losing my wife in a car crash, my best friend set me up on a date I didn’t want. But the moment I met her, something about her felt… hauntingly familiar. I called it a pause, though honestly, it was silence.
Three years without Emma felt like a long Missouri winter road — flat, gray, endless. The kind where your radio crackles and the heater only blows on one foot. The air in the house was thick with unspoken ‘if onlys’ and the sharp scent of guilt.
I’d wake up, wash the same coffee mug, check twice if the stove was off, and drive to the garage where I could hide behind the smell of oil and someone else’s broken stories. Folks around here say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Thing was, I was broke all over and I didn’t dare touch it. I still remembered the sound of screeching tires.
The way the sky went white, then black. I survived, and that word alone kept me up at night. I survived.
She didn’t. Every time I tried to sleep, the images played back, soundless and cruel. If only I’d driven slower.
If only I’d hit the brakes sooner. If only I hadn’t looked down at the damn radio. “Jack,” Barb from the local diner snapped her fingers in front of me.
She had been waitressing there since disco was cool, and she knew everyone’s sad story by the way they drank their coffee. “You’re starin’ at that coffee like it’s gonna talk back. It’s been dead for ten minutes.”
“It’s fine,” I muttered.
“Cold’s honest.”
“You turning into a poet now?” she smirked, sliding a slice of cherry pie my way. “Eat somethin’, sweetheart. You look like a ghost that forgot to haunt.”
Then came Mike — loud, messy, grinning Mike.
He was the one guy who still showed up, rain or shine, and refused to let me stay completely buried. He dropped onto the stool beside me and stretched his long legs. “Man, you hear me?” he said, elbowing me, his voice cutting through the diner’s easy noise.
“I know this is a sore subject, but three years is three bad years. You gotta start livin’ again.”
“Come on, buddy,” he said, waving at Barb for another coffee. “You come in, stare at your reflection, pay, and vanish.
You used to laugh so loud, the jukebox gave up. What happened to that guy?”
“He had Emma next to him.”
The air went still. Even Barb turned down the music, pretending to wipe a clean counter.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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