When your days become one and the same, time takes on a strange quality. It stretches endlessly and disappears without warning. My mornings always began the same way.
At 6:30, I would wake to the faint light pressing through the curtains, the creak of old floorboards under my feet, the familiar ache in my knees, and the loneliness that seemed to stretch across every room of the house Helena and I had built together. Seventy-three years is long enough to learn one simple truth: a house without the person you loved most is no longer a home in the way it once was. It becomes walls, a roof, furniture, and echoes.
My name is Gilbert Proud. For three years, I had lived alone in our house in Northport, a coastal town in the United States where people still waved from porches and remembered who had planted which maple tree twenty years ago. Helena left quietly in her sleep after forty-seven years of marriage, leaving me with old framed photographs, handwritten letters, and the terrible habit of speaking to her portrait over morning tea.
“It’s going to rain today, Helena,” I would mutter, looking up at the frowning gray sky beyond the kitchen window. “My knees are aching more than usual.”
No answer ever came. Only the ticking of the old mantel clock, the groan of the wind outside, and the soft rattling of the windows when a truck rolled past on the street.
I had gotten used to the silence, though there were mornings when the silence felt almost loud enough to crush me. Our house was both my fortress and my curse. It was a two-story place with a wide front veranda, white railings, a brick chimney, and a small garden where Helena had grown roses and hydrangeas.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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