Yesterday was day forty-seven. I came home from a client meeting and there was a brown paper grocery bag sitting on our porch with nothing inside but a pressed white flower — a white daisy, the kind Marguerite used to keep on her kitchen windowsill in mason jars, the kind that bloomed in her garden every May. There was no note. There didn't need to be. I sat on the porch for an hour with the flower in my hand, and I cried in a way I hadn't cried in forty-seven days — not from guilt, not from anger, not from fear. From something quieter. Hope, maybe. Or grief for the version of us that won't survive whatever comes next, even if he comes home. We're going to have to talk, eventually, about what I said in that kitchen. Whether those words can be unsaid. Whether a relationship can survive being told your dead mother would be ashamed of you. I don't know the answer. I don't know if he knows. So I'm asking you — did I say what needed to be said, or did I say the one thing I should have taken to the grave?

* Story inspired by real-life situations. Names and details have been changed for privacy.