I Thought I’d Be Eating Dinner Alone… Until She Walked In And Said, “Can We Sit Here For A While?”

I knew that better than most.

Anna died three years earlier when a drunk contractor in a lifted pickup ran a red light and slammed into her driver’s side door. She had just finished a twelve-hour nursing shift at St. Luke’s Hospital. She was still wearing her scrubs when they pulled her from the wreck.

The police officer who came to my porch took off his hat before he said her name.

That was how I knew my life was already over.

Since then, Friday nights belonged to the dead.