Kevin called me from the hospital. “Rose,” he said, and his voice was wrecked. “She’s gone.”
The months after that were a blur.
Funeral plans. Kevin and I leaned on each other because we were the two people who loved Emily most. Nothing happened between us then.
But grief changes the shape of everything. Over time, we got close in a way that scared both of us. We talked about Emily constantly.
We told ourselves we were just surviving. Then one night, almost two years later, Kevin looked at an old photo of Emily and said, “She would want the people she loved most to take care of each other.”
We took it painfully slow. We built our whole relationship around the idea that love after loss did not have to be a betrayal.
