Chapter 3: The Slow Erasure
After the funeral, I stayed with my parents because I had nowhere else to go. Daniel’s military benefits were tied up in paperwork. The house we had been renting was sold. I was pregnant, grieving, and completely alone.
At first, my parents acted sympathetic. My mother made me tea. My father occasionally asked how I was feeling. But as the weeks turned into months, the patience wore thin.
Rachel moved back in with her new husband, Mark. They took the master bedroom. I was moved to the smallest guest room. Then they started making comments.
“You’re eating a lot these days.”
“Pregnancy makes some women so emotional.”
“Maybe if you had been more careful, Daniel wouldn’t have had to work so hard.”
Every night, after everyone went to sleep, I would open my laptop and continue the work Daniel had started before his last deployment. He had been developing a new encrypted communication system for special operations — something that could maintain signal even in the worst conditions. He called it Project Sentinel.
He never got to finish it.
So I did.
Night after night, in the quiet hours when the house was dark, I sat at the small desk in the corner of my room and coded. I fixed the flaws. I improved the algorithms. I poured every ounce of grief and love into that project.
I never told anyone.
May you like
Because I knew they wouldn’t understand.
And because, deep down, I was terrified that if they knew what I was working on, they would try to take it from me too.
