Six months after Sarah’s funeral, my Saturdays had a rhythm: flowers in the passenger seat, a thermos of coffee, and an hour beside the granite that held her name. Grief prefers routine. It gives shape to what feels shapeless.
That October afternoon, a Harley rumbled through Hillcrest’s iron gates and threaded the lanes like it had been there a hundred times. The rider—gray at the temples, leather jacket weathered by years—cut the engine, removed his helmet, and walked straight to my wife’s grave. No flowers.
No phone. He simply sat cross-legged, bowed his head, and stayed. The next Saturday at precisely 2:00 p.m., he returned.
And the next. Always the same place, the same hour, the same quiet hour-long vigil. Sometimes his shoulders shook.
Sometimes his hand pressed to the stone like a benediction. He never looked around. He never saw me watching.
Curiosity curdled into something harder—questions that paced at night. Who was he? How did he know my wife’s resting place by heart?
Why had Sarah never mentioned a man like this—boots scuffed by distance, grief carried like a weight you learn to live under? On a gray December Saturday, I stepped out of my car and waited beside Sarah’s headstone. When the Harley rolled in, I stayed where I was.
He stopped three paces away, palm finding the cool granite as if greeting an old friend. I cleared my throat. “I’m Sarah’s husband,” I said.
“Who are you?”
He kept his hand on the stone. When he finally spoke, the voice was careful, steady. “Marcus,” he said.
“I loved her when we were seventeen. We were going to be married.”
The cemetery seemed suddenly larger, the sky lower. He wasn’t trying to take something from me; he was placing something beside me—heavy, undeniable, true.
“The hour matters,” Marcus continued, eyes on her name. “Saturdays at two were ours. Down by the river, where the cottonwoods leaned over the water.
She promised we’d always keep an hour for each other. Life… decided otherwise.”
He unfolded the past without asking my permission to tell it. Sarah, the banker’s daughter with a scholarship and a plan.
Marcus, the mechanic’s son with grease under his nails and the road in his bones. Her father’s ultimatum. Her tears.
Their parting on the hood of a car they couldn’t afford to keep. “We said we’d find our way back,” he said. “But time keeps moving.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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