The house settled around me with its familiar sounds, the creak of boards, the tick of the furnace, the silence that was not empty but full, full of forty years of double shifts and snowstorm tire changes and ice chips at three in the morning and a man who never asked for softness and who received, in the end, the only thing he wanted. Not to be saved from aging. To be seen through it.
To matter to his own people. To stay.
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