no real idea if it would’ve been something she liked. He’d known her, well enough to be able to guess, but it wasn’t like it had come directly from her. He was building it. And the fact was, she couldn’t live in it. He didn’t think of it as his house, because he couldn’t imagine getting to a space where he actually wanted to live in it. It was just something he was doing.
He stepped out of the truck, and surveyed the site. The skeletal walls, so far from completion, and as long as he did it by himself, he had a feeling it would remain pretty far from completion.
He needed a team. He needed a crew.
He couldn’t finish this by himself.
And before that hadn’t mattered, because not only had it been nobody’s house, there had been no rush because he had no idea who might live in it. In fact, in his head he had imagined it as a mausoleum. Nothing more than an empty tomb. Containing nothing, least of all life. A monument to death. Was that what he’d been building?
Well, the fact was, it was what his life had been.
A monument to death.
Certainly not a monument to love, or to the life that he’d once had.
A piss-poor tribute to the people who had once loved him more than anything on earth. The people he loved so very much still.
It was complicated. They didn’t need him to love them in the way he once had. They weren’t here for him to care for.
They were... They were safe.
And all of this that he’d done, this isolation, living up here... He’d been protecting them. Because he was still a husband. He was still a father. That love had not been removed from his body. He hadn’t lost who he was. He carried it with him.
But they were safe.
He believed that in his soul. They were cared for. They didn’t have the same needs as those who were still left on earth, living life.
He didn’t need to protect them.
But he could do a better job of sharing who they’d been. Of sharing the good that they’d done for him as a man. Because it had been a lot. Their legacy didn’t just begin at the hurt that he felt over losing them. And it shouldn’t. Their legacy was bigger than that. His wife’s existence had enriched the lives of so many, not just him. She was more than just his wife. And she was more than just his pain. And his little girl... She was more than that too. She was more than her death. She was smiles and giggles and a deep, real joy that he’d felt. That he knew existed. They had taught him that deep and beautiful things existed in the world.
Their legacy should be hope.
Their legacy should be love.
Wasn’t that a better legacy than death?
And wasn’t it up to him to carry that forward?
This house.
He had built it with his grief. He had fueled it with the sweat and tears that poured from him as he had hammered each and every nail. But somewhere along the lines, sometime in the last month or so, the tenor of the hammer hitting the nails had taken on a new sound. A new purpose.
Because he could see a life lived in that house. He could see it filled with people. Filled with love. Filled with children. He could see a future where he lived there. Not by himself in a cabin with no electricity, no water, no. He could see a future where he didn’t just survive. He could see a future where he lived.
And he wanted that future.
For the first time in so long he wanted.
And that had to matter. It did matter.
But it could only matter as much as he let it. And he had to be brave. He had to be brave, and step out and demand that life give him something more. There was fate, and he was beginning to believe in it. In the form of one petite woman who had come up the hill carrying a plate of cookies not knowing who she would meet at the top of it. A woman who had seen a sign on a bakery for rent, who had come into his life when he had needed her most.
But fate couldn’t do everything. Not for him and not for anyone. It didn’t just dish out the bad, it brought the good, but you had to be able to reach