The first thing I noticed was the light.
It was wrong.
Late-afternoon sun always hit the back of my property in a certain way, slanting through the trees and catching on the fence line I’d built with my own hands. The wood usually threw long, familiar shadows across the grass, bars of gold and dark that told me I was home before I even cut the engine. It had become one of those tiny reliable things you stop consciously appreciating until the day it’s gone. That evening, when I turned off the truck and stepped out into the gravel, the light poured across the yard in one uninterrupted sheet, too wide, too exposed, too open. My body knew before my brain admitted it.
For a moment I just stood there with the keys still in my hand, listening to the ticking engine, staring at the empty stretch behind the house and waiting for the rest of the world to rearrange itself into something sensible.
