The silence hit me before anything else.
I had driven four hours through Thanksgiving traffic with a cooler packed full of fresh cranberries, sweet potatoes, and the expensive vanilla beans Brady had specifically requested for his favorite pie. I had taken three days off work for this. I had planned the menu in a notebook I kept on my nightstand, cross-referencing it against the dietary restrictions Brady’s mother had mentioned in passing at Easter. I had been looking forward to this the way you look forward to things when you are trying, with genuine effort, to build something out of materials that have never quite held together the way you hoped.
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