After a devastating loss, Claire is barely holding it together — until her body gives out and her mother-in-law steps in with an unexpected solution. But when Claire returns home, what she finds behind her front door changes everything. I used to think I understood grief — until the hurricane took Mark.
They called it “a once-in-a-generation storm,” the kind that leaves towns shredded and silent. We’d heard the warnings, stocked the pantry, and charged the batteries. When the sky turned gray and the wind sounded like it was screaming, I packed up the kids and left to a safer place.
My husband, Mark, stayed behind to secure the windows and tie down the shutters. He promised he’d follow. He never made it back.
I still remember the sirens, the rain like fists on the roof, and the silence afterward.
I came home to find half our roof gone, water running down the walls, and the air thick with mold and things I couldn’t name. Mark’s boots were still by the door. That was a year ago.
The house was technically livable.
We had patched the worst leaks, cleared the debris, and made sure the kids had beds to sleep in. But every wall I looked at, every peeled strip of wallpaper or water-stained ceiling, whispered the same thing: this is where everything changed. This is where the storm hit, where their father died, where we all broke a little.
I wasn’t just fixing a house, I was trying to protect my children from the grief buried in the drywall. And every day it stayed like this…
I felt like I was failing them. Since then, I’ve been surviving.
I’m 37, a widow, raising three kids — Mia, 12; Ben, 10; and little six-year-old Sophie.
Every day started before the sun came up. I worked the morning shift at the diner, pouring coffee for regulars and pretending not to wince when my knees locked up from fatigue. In the evenings, after dinner and homework and baths, I stayed up editing documents for clients I never met — legal files, academic papers, and manuscripts about lives I’d never lived.
Every single dollar I earned went straight back into that broken house. I replaced the floorboards that Mark had promised to fix next summer. I scrubbed mold until my hands cracked.
I tried to rehang the wallpaper that peeled like skin, but the glue never stuck for long. Still, I tried. I just wanted the kids to have a home that didn’t feel like it was collapsing under the weight of memory.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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