Part One: The Dog Beside the Grave

The cemetery was always quiet on Sunday mornings.

Dew clung to the grass, and the trees whispered whenever the wind passed through their branches. I had grown familiar with that silence. For two years, I had walked the same gravel path, carrying a small bunch of yellow daisies—Ethan’s favorite flowers.

My son had died just three weeks before his eighth birthday.

Every Sunday, I came to his grave and told him about the life continuing without him. I told him what I had cooked, which neighbors had visited, and which television shows he would probably have loved.

That morning, I placed the daisies beside his headstone and brushed a few leaves away.