The Weight of Wet Wool

Mara stood outside the funeral home, rain plastering her **orange** hair against her skull like a second skin. She'd forgotten her **hat**—the fedora David had bought her in Rome, back when they were still making memories instead of just accumulating years of silent dinners and separate beds. The wool would have been heavy now, sodden with grief and rain, but she missed its weight anyway. Some things you carried even when they hurt.

Inside, she accepted a plastic cup of **water** from a woman she didn't recognize. The condensation slicked her palm, cool and impersonal. She should have been crying. Everyone else was—the widow's sobs came in waves, synchronized with the murmur of appropriately mournful whispers. But Mara felt hollowed out, like a room where the furniture had been rearranged one too many times until nothing fit anymore.

That's when she saw the **dog**.

An elderly golden retriever, lying near the casket, chin resting on worn paws. David's dog, technically, though Mara had walked her every morning for three years. Buster, he'd called her. Neither of them had been particularly creative.

The dog lifted her head at Mara's approach, milky eyes finding focus. Her tail gave one thump against the carpet. Recognition.

Mara sank to the floor beside her, heedless of her black stockings. The dog pressed her warm side against Mara's arm, solid and living, and suddenly Mara was crying—not pretty tears, but the ugly kind that left her gasping, forehead pressed into coarse fur that smelled of rain and dog and the last seven years of her life.

"She's been waiting for you," David's widow said softly.

Mara looked up. The woman's mascara had smudged, giving her the appearance of someone half-drowned. She wasn't angry. She looked exhausted.

"You can have her," the widow continued. "David said... if anything happened... you loved her more."

The dog thumped her tail again.

Outside, the rain kept falling. But inside, something finally broke loose, and Mara let herself imagine tomorrow morning—the leash in her hand, the cool air, a creature who needed her simply because she was there. Some endings were also beginnings. She just had to be brave enough to step through them.