"Remember, my little love," he'd said, his voice carrying across the water as I sat on the dock with him, "life is just an accumulation of micro-moments. If we're not present for them, we'll miss the beauty of a moment we'll never get back."

His words echo now, bittersweet and sharp as broken glass. He was right—when a moment's gone, it's gone forever. Memories don't stay neatly contained; they ebb and flow like tides, dragging you into seas of either joy or sorrow. Loss sharpens their edges, turns even the happiest memories into weapons that cut when you least expect it. The moments we lose hurt because they remind us how precious they were to begin with.

My throat tightens, tears pricking my eyes, but I blink them back.

My gaze drifts to the floor—the exact spot where I found him. My feet are rooted, frozen in place. And just like that, I'm back there again.

Eight days ago.

My voice calling his name as I walked through the door, receiving only silence in return. The casual push of the spare living room door revealing what my mind still struggles to process.

Dad on the floor, unnaturally still. Time suspends as my brain frantically tries to make sense of the scene—this can't be happening—but my body understands immediately. My knees buckle. My lungs forget how to draw breath. My hand reaches for my phone while some distant part of me is already screaming.

I don't remember dialing 911, just fragments of my own voice—broken, desperate—explaining what I've found. The operator's calm instructions seem to come from another universe while I kneel beside him, touching his hand, still warm but wrong.

Behind me, Mom appears in the doorway. Her gasp slices through the room before morphing into a sound I'll never forget—not quite a scream, not quite a sob, but something primal that echoes the exact shattering I feel inside.

Ollie arrives next, summoned by the commotion. He crumples to the floor, whispering prayers to a God he never believed in before this moment.

The paramedics burst in—a blur of uniforms and equipment. Hands on my shoulders pull me back. "Let us try to save him," a voice says, but something in their tone tells me they already know.

My body trembles as I watch them work, going through motions that seem increasingly futile with each passing second. I stand there, holding Mom up as she shakes against me, both of us suspended between hope and the terrible truth my body already knows.

He's gone.

The memory releases me and I'm back in the present, staring at that same spot, now empty but somehow still the center of a universe that collapsed eight days and eight centuries ago.