Page 7 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Mountain Man

Describe your cabin.

Why?

Because I've been imagining it for weeks. I want to know if I'm right.

One story. Log. Porch with a rocking chair I built. Woodpile against the south wall. Kitchen with a coffee maker that hates me. View of the Selkirks from every window.

Alone?

Yeah.

Always?

The question lands in my sternum. Not alone always. Alone now. Alone since 4:17am on a Tuesday when everything good in my life stopped breathing.

Not always.

She doesn't push. Doesn't ask. Just sends:

Okay.

That's it. One word. More grace than I've received from anyone in five years, including myself.

Later that night, past midnight, another buzz.

I want to tell you something. And I don't want you to try to fix it.

Okay.

My engagement wasn't just wrong. It was erasing me. Tunde wanted a wife who'd host dinners for his colleagues, attend galas at the hospital foundation, wear the right outfits, say the right things. He wasn't cruel about it. He was kind. That was worse. Because I couldn't point to a single terrible thing he did. He just quietly expected me to disappear into his life, and I was doing it. Happily. Gratefully. For fourteen months, I was grateful to be disappearing.

And then?

Then one day I looked in the mirror while getting dressed for his department Christmas party. I was wearing a dress his mother picked out. My hair was blown straight because he once said he liked it that way. The shoes were a gift from his sister. And I couldn't find a single thing on my body that I'd chosen.

I gave back the ring the next morning. Moved out that afternoon. My mother didn't speak to me for three weeks.

My hands are still on the phone. The cabin is dark. Just the blue glow of the screen in my bedroom, the same ceiling I've stared at for five years, the same quiet.

But the quiet isn't empty anymore. Hasn't been for weeks.

You did the right thing.

Everybody says that.

I mean it. You looked in the mirror and you chose yourself. That takes more courage than anything I've done in five years.

Silence. Long enough that I wonder if she fell asleep. Then:

What happened five years ago?

There it is. The question she's been circling for weeks without asking. The crater in the center of everything I am, the one all my silence is built around.

My thumbs hover. The screen blurs. Annika's text thread is still right there in my phone, still sitting at the top where I put it, her last words preserved like a headstone I carry in my pocket.

My wife died.

We were married three years. She went to bed with a headache. I was out on a call. Brain aneurysm. She was 32.