The Last Run

The first thing Sarah noticed when she woke was the missing photograph. The one of her and David at the pier, eight years ago, his arm draped over her shoulders like a protective wing. It had been on her nightstand since their separation, a daily ritual of reopening a wound that refused to heal.

Then she saw the hat.

David's old Cubs cap sat on her pillow, positioned with terrible precision, the brim facing her as if he'd just placed it there. Her heart kicked against her ribs. David had died two years ago. She'd attended the funeral. She'd watched him lowered into the ground beside his parents in Illinois.

Unless.

Her phone began ringing — David's sister, something strange about the cemetery, something about the wrong casket, someone else's body, and oh god, Sarah, we don't know whose body it was, but it wasn't David.

Sarah was already running.

Out the door, down three flights of stairs, her bare feet slapping against pavement, breath tearing through her throat like broken glass. The summer air was thick and suffocating. She ran toward the lake, where they'd scattered what they thought were his ashes, where she'd spent countless mornings walking Buster, the elderly dog David had left behind when he'd "passed," the dog who'd looked at her with unsettling intelligence, who'd recently stopped eating, who'd died quietly in his sleep last week.

The hair stood on her arms. Buster had been waiting for something. Or someone.

The pier stretched into gray water like a confession made too late. Sarah forced herself forward, each step an argument between hope and terror. At the end, a figure turned toward her, silhouetted against the gathering storm.

The familiar tilt of his head. The way his hands settled in his pockets. The crinkles around eyes that had seen everything, said nothing.

David placed a second hat on the railing beside him — hers, the one she'd worn to his memorial service. The wind caught it, but he caught it back, his movements measured, practiced.

"You're supposed to be dead," she called across the distance, her voice strange in her own ears.

"You're supposed to be happy, Sarah. That was the deal."

Behind her, thunder cracked like the world breaking open. She kept running anyway.