Dorothy stared at the monitor until the green light blurred.
The next morning, a sympathy card sat on the kitchen counter beside the coffee maker. White lilies on the front. Inside, in elegant slanted handwriting:
To my love. The hardest part is over. Now we begin.
V.
Dorothy read it twice, set it back down exactly where she had found it, and poured her coffee.
Grant came in five minutes later wearing pressed slacks and the expression of a man managing a difficult but noble season in life.
“You’re up early,” he said.
“So are you,” Dorothy replied.
He smiled thinly and reached for a mug.
Dorothy took her coffee to the window over the sink and looked out at the wet lawn where Colleen had once planned to plant peonies.
The grief remained. It would remain. She understood that.
But now it had company.
By the fourth day after the funeral, Dorothy was no longer only a mourning mother.
She was a woman paying attention.
And before that week ended, she would kneel in her daughter’s nursery, move a stack of baby blankets aside, and find the first proof that Colleen had not gone into motherhood blindly at all.
She had gone into it preparing for war.
Part 2
Dorothy waited until evening to enter the nursery closet.
All day she behaved exactly as a grieving mother-in-law was expected to behave. She warmed bottles, changed diapers, thanked nurses, and pretended not to notice that Grant disappeared to take private phone calls in the garden. She pretended not to see the subtle rearranging already underway in the house: Colleen’s framed bridal portrait removed from the hallway table, a drawer in the kitchen emptied of her stationery, fresh flowers in a vase that had never once held flowers when Colleen was alive because, as Colleen used to say, “I like my beauty attached to roots.”
At eight-thirty, Grant announced he had to meet the funeral director about thank-you notes and insurance paperwork.
Dorothy asked no questions.
The moment his car left the driveway, she went upstairs.
The nursery smelled faintly of baby powder, warm cotton, and the lavender sachets Colleen tucked into drawers because she swore the scent made everything feel calmer. Three cribs stood in a neat row against the far wall beneath painted clouds. A rocking chair sat by the window with a folded blanket over one arm, waiting for the woman who would never sit there.
Dorothy crossed the room, opened the closet, and knelt.