For six months, I watched him from inside my car.
Same day.
Same time.
Every Saturday at exactly 2 PM, he would ride into the cemetery on his Harley, park near the old oak tree, and walk straight to Emily’s headstone.
Then he would sit beside her grave for one full hour.
He never brought flowers.
Never left a note.
Never spoke loud enough for me to hear.
He just sat cross-legged in the grass, head lowered, like he was carrying a pain too heavy to stand with.
The first time I saw him, I thought he had made a mistake.
It was a large cemetery. Graves could be easy to confuse.
But then he came back the next Saturday.
And the Saturday after that.
And again after that.
Week after week, this stranger mourned my wife like she had belonged to him too.
At first, I was confused.
Then I became angry.
Who was he?
How did he know Emily?
Why was this man showing up for her every week when some people in her own family barely came at all?
Emily had died fourteen months earlier from breast cancer.
She was only forty-three.
We had been married for twenty years.
Two children.
A quiet home.
A normal life.
