Then when I was eleven, taking the bus home from school for the first time, we passed the shop where Mom used to work. The bus ride lasts twelve minutes and twenty-nine seconds, then it’s fifteen footsteps to the alley.

I dared myself to walk through but refused every time.

When I finally found the courage, I counted one minute and forty-two seconds from one end to the other…from the shortcut to home.

She made it halfway, less than a minute from safety.

Chapter 4

There are no rules for mourning.

When Mom died, the house felt gray and haunted, and Dad didn’t look like himself anymore.

One day, all the pictures of her disappeared, gone as suddenly as she was.

It was Dad’s way of preparing me for a truth he couldn’t speak.

People told him to move, that it was unhealthy to live near the alley where your wife was murdered. But he ignored them.

I heard him on the phone once, saying he had already lost so much of her, why would he sell his remaining memories? And that night, the photos returned, filling every surface.

She was everywhere and nowhere all at once.

I cried, but they weren’t real tears. I was copying the sadness of others rather than feeling my own.

I believed Mom would come back, convinced she would be the next knock at the door, the next phone call, the next hug from the line of strangers whose touch felt so different from hers.

People told Dad to send me to a therapist, but again he ignored them. Grief makes what you have more precious, and by then, I was all he had left. So he held me tight through his refusal to make our loss any bigger than it had to be.

It was my grandma Nan who changed that. She got tired of Dad’s stories and cried if I asked when we could visit Mom in the museum for shiny things. She said I would find out eventually, and the sooner the better, so she told me Mom was gone forever.

I called her a liar. I hated her. And then I cried the sharpest, heaviest, most unbearable tears of my life.

Your grief journey changes when you aren’t looking. It moves in fractions: black shifting through a thousand shades of gray. It transforms into something else: a dull ache, a numbness that becomes the norm.

Websites told me to write a note and put it in a balloon and release it to heaven. Or make a memory quilt and fall asleep wrapped in Mom’s best parts. Or make a wish list of all the things to do before I died.

I took pictures and hoarded the ones my parents had taken. I drew and painted and wrote shitty poetry and started a feelings journal. None of it worked, but I tried.