About a year after my mother passed away, my father invited me to dinner. He said it would be just the three of us, and he mentioned Lena’s name as casually as if it meant nothing at all. I assumed he did not want to sit through another quiet meal alone.
When I arrived, the house looked different. It smelled freshly cleaned, like lemon polish and roasted chicken. Lena answered the door wearing the same apron my mother used to wear, the one with faded flowers along the edge. Inside, everything was arranged just so. Pillows were perfectly lined up. Magazines sat neatly stacked. It felt as if my mother had just stepped out of the room, which made my chest ache in a way I was not prepared for.
Dinner itself was calm and polite, almost too calm. I noticed how Lena refilled my father’s glass before he asked and how she passed him the salt without him reaching for it. She seemed to know his habits instinctively. At the time, I told myself she was simply being helpful.
Halfway through the meal, my father set his fork down and cleared his throat. He looked nervous in a way I had not seen since the day we received the news about my mother.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “Lena and I are getting married.”
For a moment, the words did not make sense. They floated in the air, disconnected from reality.
“Oh,” was all I could manage.
Lena reached for his hand and squeezed it. She said they had been supporting each other for a long time and that their connection had grown naturally. My father added that she had been staying in the house for months, something I had never been told.
Life moves quickly, he said. He did not want to spend it alone.
I did not argue. I did not cry. I sat there trying to process the idea of my aunt stepping into my mother’s place, both literally and figuratively. I wanted my father to find comfort. I just did not know how to reconcile that wish with the knot in my stomach.
In the weeks that followed, the engagement became public. Friends and relatives spoke about second chances and unexpected love. Some even said my mother would have wanted this, as if they knew her thoughts better than I did. I nodded and smiled and kept my doubts to myself. It felt wrong to disrupt what everyone else seemed eager to celebrate.
As the wedding approached, Lena began to resemble my mother more and more. She wore her hair the same way. She chose similar clothes. She moved through the house as if it had always been hers. Each detail felt like a small echo, and together they were overwhelming.
A few days before the ceremony, the family gathered at my grandmother’s house. Conversations drifted toward fate and timing, toward the idea that love finds a way even after loss. I slipped away to sit alone, trying to breathe through the weight of it all.
My grandmother found me there. She studied my face for a long moment and said I looked heartbroken. When I told her how fast everything felt, how it seemed like my mother had not even been given time to be gone, her expression changed.
She took my hand and asked me to come with her.
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