I wasn’t sure if I was losing my grip on reality or if something more unsettling was at play. After visiting my wife’s grave, I came home to find the very same flowers I had left there now sitting in a vase on the kitchen table. Five years had passed since I buried Winter and along with her, my guilt but the past wasn’t finished with me.

Grief never truly fades. Our daughter Eliza was only 13 when Winter passed; she’s 18 now, carrying the weight of that loss like a constant shadow. As the anniversary approached, I mentioned to her I was going to the cemetery. She looked at me with unreadable eyes and said, “It’s that time again, isn’t it, Dad?”

I picked up white roses from the florist Winter’s favorite and laid them gently at her grave, whispering the words I always did: how much I missed her. But when I got home, my heart stopped. Those same white roses were on the kitchen table. I asked Eliza if she had brought them in she denied it. Confused and unsettled, I insisted we return to the grave.

When we arrived, the flowers were gone. Back at the house, I found a note tucked beneath the vase, written in Winter’s handwriting: “I know the truth and forgive you. Face what you’ve hidden.” That’s when Eliza confessed she had known all along about my affair, the argument that led to Winter’s death. The flowers, the note it was all her way of making me face the truth I’d avoided for years. Some wounds never close. They don’t disappear. They simply wait until you finally turn toward them.