Eleanor fell first. Ten days of fever and delirium, her skin burning, her eyes searching the ceiling as if she could find a door there.
Hartwell sat beside her bed until his own body felt made of stone, listening to her whisper names that belonged to childhood, to places he’d never seen.
Their son, Thomas, fifteen and still awkward in his limbs, tried to be brave until the fever climbed him too.
He died holding his father’s hand, the grip tightening not in anger but in terror, as if he thought he could pull himself back into the world by sheer will.
Their daughter, Caroline, twelve, lasted one terrible day longer, calling for her mother in a voice that cracked and faded until it became a sound Hartwell would later hear in his dreams even when he swore he was awake.
Three coffins. Three white crosses. One old oak at the family plot behind the house, thick enough to cast shade like mercy.
Hartwell watched the dirt fall and felt something inside him go silent. It wasn’t simply sorrow. It was the sudden understanding that the life he had built had been balanced on people he loved, and without them the rest of it looked like a large, expensive mistake.
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