A deer at the edge of the clearing, listening to something beyond the frame. They were not gallery paintings. Some proportions were wrong. He never could paint clouds quite right. Water reflections were sometimes too careful. But they were honest. They looked the way the land felt to him, and that was better.
I put the suitcases down, sat on the couch, and something inside me gave way.
Not the dramatic kind of breaking. No elegant collapse. More like the sound an old house makes at night when it shifts under a weight it has carried too long. I sat there in the dark cabin with the dying flashlight pointed toward the kitchen floor and cried for hours.
When I finally got up, I found the fuse box in the hall closet, flipped three breakers, and the kitchen light flickered on. The cabin was cold and dusty and mine, and for that first night it was the only thing in the world that still was.
Two weeks earlier, I had sat in a courtroom and watched a judge divide my life.