The phone didn’t care about miracles. Under the harsh bank lights, the voice on the other end was young, puzzled, alive in all the wrong ways. A recycled number, a stranger’s hotel bill, and the brutal efficiency of systems that erase and replace. When the call ended, the silence felt heavier than the ring. Embarrassment stung, anger flared, but beneath it all was something far more unsettling: the raw, unbroken instinct to hope.

That flicker of hope didn’t make me foolish; it made me honest. It revealed how love keeps its own clock, refusing to sync with death certificates and disconnected lines. I didn’t delete his name or change the sound. I let it stay, not as a denial of his absence, but as proof of a presence that outlived him. Grief, I realized, isn’t love’s ending. It’s the language love speaks after the door has already closed.