My wife threw the last scrapbook my daughter had of her dead mother into our fireplace.
Lucy screamed before the cover even touched the flames.
For one terrible second, I watched years of photographs, handwritten notes, hospital bracelets, birthday cards, movie tickets, and memories disappear into orange fire.
But what happened afterward made me realize Caroline had not destroyed that book because she was jealous of a dead woman.
She had destroyed it because she knew the dead woman had left something behind.
Something meant for me.
Something Caroline desperately needed to keep hidden.
My first wife, Anna, died when our daughter Lucy was only four years old.
Cancer took her slowly.
By the time Anna died, Lucy was still too young to understand why her mother had spent so many months in hospitals, why her hair disappeared, or why Daddy sometimes cried alone in the garage.
What Lucy did understand was that her mother was gone.
And the scrapbook became the closest thing she had to keeping Anna alive.
Anna had started making it shortly after Lucy was born.
It was thick, handmade, and covered in faded blue fabric.
Inside were hundreds of tiny pieces of our life together.
There was the hospital bracelet from the day Lucy was born.
A photograph of Anna asleep with newborn Lucy on her chest.
A movie ticket from the first film Lucy ever saw in a theater.
A restaurant napkin with a tiny drawing Anna had made while waiting for dinner.
Birthday cards.
Pressed flowers.
Polaroids.
Receipts from family trips.
Little handwritten notes explaining moments Lucy would otherwise never remember.
One note beside a photograph of Lucy covered in chocolate cake said:
“Lucy insisted the spoon was unnecessary.”
Another beside a picture of me holding Lucy upside down read:
“Michael is teaching our daughter absolutely nothing useful.”
Anna’s handwriting was everywhere.
That was what made the scrapbook precious.
Lucy could not remember the sound of her mother’s voice clearly anymore.
But she knew the shape of her handwriting.
Every year on the anniversary of Anna’s death, Lucy would take the scrapbook to my mother’s house.
The two of them would sit together on the couch, turning pages slowly.
My mother would tell stories.
Lucy would ask questions.
Sometimes they laughed.
Sometimes they cried.
I never stopped them.
I thought Lucy deserved to know her mother.
Caroline disagreed.
I married Caroline six years after Anna died.
At first, she seemed patient about my past.
She never asked me to remove Anna’s photographs.
She never complained when Lucy talked about her mother.
She even attended the first memorial dinner after we married.
But over time, things changed.
Not dramatically.
Not enough that I recognized the pattern immediately.
