On quiet Sunday mornings, Everett still drove out to the fairgrounds sometimes. Alone, before anyone else woke up. He never told Naomi why, and she never asked. He'd just stand near the spot where her folding table used to sit. Coffee in hand, watching the sun come up over empty grass. It wasn't about the past anymore, not really. It was a reminder of how easily something ordinary and good could almost slip away. And how much it mattered to notice, this time, before it did.
Everett kept one thing from that whole ordeal. Tucked in a drawer he rarely opens. The printed hospital record. The one with his name listed under Emergency Contact. Husband.
He kept it, he told Naomi once, as a reminder. Not of what Paige had taken. Of what almost slipped away completely. And somehow, against every odd stacked against it, didn't.
Naomi kept something too, though she never told him about it until years later. The ultrasound printout from that lonely afternoon in the clinic parking lot. Two flickering heartbeats on a strip of gray paper, folded small, tucked inside an old recipe box. "I almost threw it away a dozen times that year," she admitted once, long after the wedding. "I'm glad you didn't," Everett said. "Me too," she said. "Even on the worst days, it reminded me they were real." "That I wasn't imagining a future worth fighting for."
