Rain soaked my jacket as I knelt beside Anna’s grave, brushing mud from the carved letters of her name. My hands shook—not from the cold, but from the truth pressing against my chest.
“I still love you,” I whispered. “And I love her too. I don’t know how to hold both without breaking.”
Then, behind me, a voice spoke—soft, steady, unmistakably human.
“Love doesn’t disappear just because someone does.”
I turned, startled.
A woman stood a few steps away, holding a small bundle of white roses.
Rain clung to her hair and coat, yet she seemed oddly untouched by it. Her expression wasn’t curious or intrusive—just gentle.
“You don’t stop loving the dead,” she continued. “You just learn to carry that love in a different way.”
Her name was Elena Hayes. She told me her brother had died while serving overseas three years earlier. Stormy nights drew her here, she said. They felt honest. Unfiltered.
We talked—not as strangers, but as people who recognized the same fracture in each other. She didn’t offer advice. She didn’t try to fix me. She simply understood.
When she finally walked away, disappearing between the headstones, something inside me shifted. I wasn’t healed. But I felt… opened. As if the weight I’d been carrying had cracked instead of crushing me.
The next morning, standing at the altar, I watched Claire walk toward me—her eyes steady, her smile nervous and real.
I knew then that love wasn’t a choice between past and present.
But Elena’s words echoed in my mind like a quiet warning, reminding me that some truths don’t demand answers—only honesty.
And that the way we carry love matters just as much as who we give it to.
And when the minister asked, “Do you, Daniel, take this woman—forsaking all others?” my throat closed.
My entire future hung on my answer.
And in that suspended second, something happened that no one in the chapel was prepared for…
The minister cleared his throat. “Daniel?”
My lips parted, but the words wouldn’t come.
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