After my husband’s funeral, I came home still wearing the black dress that held the day’s warmth and the faint, suffocating scent of lilies.

I opened the front door expecting silence.

Not ordinary silence, but the kind grief leaves behind when the last condolence has been spoken and the world finally steps back, leaving you alone with what has been taken. I expected that hollow stillness. That awful, unreal quiet where mourning is no longer public performance but something private and brutal.