She rejected seven dresses.
Too boring.
Too pale.
Too “funeral-ish,” as she put it.
Then she saw the red one.
It hung near the back wall beneath a row of formal gowns.
Maya stopped walking.
“That one.”
She didn’t even ask the price.
She carried it into the dressing room and came out ten minutes later with tears in her eyes.
Not sad tears.
Happy ones.
For the first time in weeks, she looked like herself again.
She spun once in front of the mirror.
“What do you think?”
Eli looked up from his phone.
He smiled.
“You look obnoxious.”
“Perfect.”
She grinned.
“I’ll take it.”
On the drive back to the hospital, Maya asked me to stop near an old roadside produce stand.
There was a patch of wildflowers growing beside the fence.
She asked Eli to help her out of the car.
I watched them walk slowly together.
A few minutes later, she returned holding a tiny yellow flower.
Nothing special.
Just a small daisy.
She placed it carefully between two pages of a paperback she’d been reading.
Eli noticed.
“What are you doing?”
“Saving something.”
“For what?”
She smiled at him.
“You ask too many questions.”
That night, I forgot about the flower.
Eli didn’t.
Maya died eighteen days later.
She was eighteen years old.
And graduation was twenty-two days away.
There are moments in a parent’s life that divide everything into before and after.
Losing Maya was mine.
Our house changed immediately.
Her shoes were still by the back door.
Her shampoo was still in the shower.
A half-empty water bottle sat beside her bed.
Her graduation cap arrived in the mail two days after the funeral.
I left the package unopened on the kitchen counter for nearly a week because I couldn’t bring myself to touch it.
Eli barely spoke.
People kept asking me how he was doing.
I never knew what to say.
He showered.
He ate when reminded.
He went back to school.
Technically, he was functioning.
But a part of him seemed to have disappeared with his sister.
Then, nine days before graduation, I came downstairs at midnight and found him sitting at the kitchen table.
The red dress was spread in front of him.
