He looked down at our hands.
“Grandpa would’ve liked that.”
“He would’ve pretended he said it first.”
Daniel laughed.
A real laugh.
For the first time in months, I saw something other than pain in his face.
We ate dinner, talked about work, and discussed a small apartment he was thinking of moving into. He told me he had started going for walks after his shifts and was considering taking a course to advance his career.
He wasn’t the same man who had sat beside me at the cemetery.
Neither was I.
But we were still here.
And that mattered.
I returned to my father’s grave once everything had settled.
I brought flowers and sat on the same stone bench where I had shown Daniel the video.
The cemetery looked almost exactly as it had that first evening. The grass was neatly trimmed, the headstones stood quietly in their rows, and the little solar lights began to glow as the sun disappeared.
