Page 78 of When Love Takes Root

My eyes burned. “JJ.”

“I’m serious.” His gaze moved over my face, careful and older than I wanted it to be. “Daddy loved you. We know that. But he didn’t love you so you could spend the rest of your life proving it by being lonely.” The sentence reached somewhere I had been avoiding all morning.

I gripped the doorframe. “Go to class before I remember I can still ground you.”

He smiled, but sadness touched the edge of it. “Love you.”

“Love you more.”

When his car pulled away, the driveway looked too empty.

I stood there until the street swallowed the sound of his engine.

I wished my heart understood resurrection as easily as my garden did.

Inside, the kitchen waited with crumbs on the island, syrup on Skye’s chair, and the ghost of questions I hadn’t answered honestly. I rinsed bowls in warm water and stared at the ring on my finger until the diamond blurred. I still wore it some days. Not every day. Not with the same ache. But that morning, I had put it on without thinking, and now it gleamed beneath the faucet like a witness.

Jamal.

My throat tightened around his name.

I could still see him at this island, leaning on one elbow with coffee in his hand, watching me run the morning like a military operation wrapped in hairbows and waffles. He’d smile while I fussed, then catch me by the waist when I moved past him too fast.

“Baby, breathe,” he would say.

And I’d roll my eyes because, back then, breathing had seemed automatic.

Now it took discipline.

I turned off the water and pressed my damp hands against the edge of the sink. Last night hadn’t felt wrong while I was living it. That was the part that scared me. Sitting across from Josiah had felt easy in places I had expected to feel locked. His laughter hadn’t erased Jamal’s. His attention hadn’t insulted my memories. His voice had made room for the woman I was now—not only the wife I had been before grief redrew me.

But ease could become dangerous if a woman mistook comfort for readiness.

What if I was lonely and calling it discernment? What if I liked being seen because motherhood and widowhood had made me useful before they made me desired? What if Josiah’s intentionality felt beautiful because I had been standing in absence so long that any warmth would look like sunrise? What if Kayden’s fear wasn’t only fear but warning? What if my son saw something I didn’t because he still watched the world from the wound his father left behind?

What if I wasn’t ready?

That thought bent me nearly in half.

I gripped the counter and lowered my head. “Lord, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

The house offered no answer. Just the tick of the kitchen clock, the hum of the refrigerator, the faraway bark of somebody’s dog, and my own breathing trying to find a rhythm.

I got dressed because service had always given my grief somewhere useful to put its hands.

Every other Friday, I volunteered at Rosehaven Senior Living, a nursing home tucked behind the medical district on the east side of Self Ridge. I started going a few months after Jamal died, when the silence in my house became too heavy. Rosehaven gave me elders who flirted, fussed, prayed, cheated at cards, and called me baby in a way that stitched something tender back into me.

By nine fifteen, I walked through the front doors, carrying a tote filled with Uno cards, sugar-free peppermints, lavender lotion, scalp oil, a rattail comb, satin scrunchies, soft-bristle brushes, and the good pens Mrs. Alberta kept stealing from me while insisting theft was impossible because she was sanctified.

The lobby smelled like lemon polish, coffee, and lavender room spray. Somewhere down the hall, a television preacher declared victory over somebody’s situation, while a nurse laughed at the front desk.

“Morning, Ms. Coleman,” Tasha, the activities coordinator, called from behind the desk.

“Morning, baby.”

“You brought Uno?”

“I brought Uno, scalp oil, and my patience, but the patience is on a timer.”