PART 1

I visited my daughter’s grave every Sunday, blaming myself for the night I didn’t pick her up. Then the cemetery groundskeeper told me another woman had been visiting with yellow daisies and whispered apologies. I thought I knew how Maya died.

I was wrong.

For a month, I brought white roses every Sunday because the florist called them “appropriate.”

Maya would have hated that.

My seventeen-year-old daughter loved yellow daisies, chipped nail polish, and jeans stained with paint.

But Maya was gone before I could bring her flowers on another birthday. Gone before graduation. Gone before the scholarship letter she had dreamed about.

And gone before I could take back the last thing I said to her.

That night, she called and asked me to pick her up because she was tired and afraid to drive in the storm.

I was exhausted from another argument between Maya and her father.

“Call your dad,” I told her. “I’m done being the referee tonight.”

Two hours later, police officers knocked on our door.

They said two cars had crashed near the bridge.

No survivors.

The funeral director recommended a closed casket.

The officers said it would be kinder that way.

So every Sunday, I knelt beside Maya’s grave and repeated the same words.

 

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