“I’m not here for my emotional baggage. I’m here for yours. Now why don’t you tell me how it feels having started this truck?” She gestured to the dash, and I smiled faintly as sunlight kissed her diamond and threw tiny dots of rainbows all through the cab.

“I still hear him,” I admitted quietly. “It’s less and less these days, but whenever I’m in here, I swear I can hear him sitting right next to me. Do you think that will ever go away?”

“Do you want it to?”

“I don’t know.” I ran my fingers over the soft, supple leather of the console that separated my seat from Sam’s. Will’s seat from mine. “In some ways, yes, because maybe that means I’m healing. Plus, I’d really like to not have an anxiety attack every time I get in this thing, and I know I’ll never sell it.” That would be like selling Will’s memory. “But I’m terrified that one day I’ll stop hearing him, and then I’ll forget the sound of his voice, his laugh, then I’ll start forgetting him. And I don’t want that, either.”

How did I make more room for Jackson in my heart without losing Will?

“That’s understandable,” Sam said, pivoting in her seat so she could look straight at me. “Do you want to drive?”

I felt my throat tighten, but it wasn’t as severe as it had been. “Not today.”

She sagged in obvious relief. I wouldn’t want to take a ride in a vehicle that gave the driver anxiety attacks, either. “You’re doing great, you know. The therapy, the homework, all of it. The tapes are sounding better and better, and you even made it through that hotspot thing with the funeral memory tape, though I don’t know any other woman in her twenties who would reward herself with Virginia Woolf.”

“Hey now, don’t mock the classics.” I looked over my shoulder to the cab, half expecting to see Will’s helmet bag and flight gear, but it was empty, of course. “I couldn’t have done it without you, Sam. And I know you’re headed home in a couple weeks, but I’m immeasurably grateful that you’ve stayed with me.”

She smiled. “I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

I looked over to Jackson’s house, then checked the clock on the dash. He usually napped the day he transitioned back to dayshift, which meant he should be waking up soon. My pulse jumped with anticipation.

“It’s okay to love him,” Sam said gently. “It doesn’t mean you loved Will any less. Or that you’re replacing him. He would want you to be happy.”