The prom dress arrived the day after Gwen’s funeral. I stood on my porch, clutching the box as if it were Gwendolyn herself, feeling the weight of a future that had been stolen. I had already buried my granddaughter; I thought I had touched the bottom of my grief.
I was wrong.
For seventeen years, Gwen had been my heartbeat. When my son David and his wife Carla were killed in an accident, Gwen was only eight. We spent years navigating the quiet rooms of our house, holding hands until the tears stopped. She was my shadow, and I was her anchor. I remember her standing in the kitchen, messy-haired and small, promising me, “Grandma, we’ll figure everything out together.”
And we did. Until the day she was gone.....
