For a decade, my Sundays followed a rigid, sacred rhythm. I would stand by the front door, keys in hand, and speak to the empty air in my hallway as if my wife, Evelyn, were still there to listen. I joked about my fading looks, asking if I was still the handsome man she had married, half-expecting a laugh that never came. It was the ritual of a lonely man, a way to anchor myself to a ghost who had been gone for ten years.
This particular Sunday, however, felt different. As I prepared to leave, my twenty-three-year-old daughter, Anna, appeared at the top of the stairs. She was an artist, usually covered in streaks of paint, but today her face was drained of all color. The brush in her hand slipped, clattering against the wooden steps, and she looked at me with a profound, suffocating dread. She pleaded with me not to go to the cemetery. I dismissed her concern with a soft kiss on her forehead, blinded by the necessity of my routine, but as I walked out the door, her eyes followed me with a desperate, unspoken warning.
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