I planned this.” I felt a massive lump form in my throat, making it difficult to swallow. I gripped the edges of the book as my eyes raced down the page. “A few weeks before I left you, I asked Sarah from next door to do me a massive favor,” the letter continued.

“I gave her a dormant, slow-growing bulb encased in a biodegradable shell. I made her promise that exactly seven years after my funeral, in the dead of autumn when you were visiting your brother, she would sneak into the yard and bury it deep in the back bed.

I chose a flower that I knew would take an extra year to finally break the surface and bloom. I engineered this surprise because I know you, David. I knew you would use this garden as a way to hold on to me. I knew you would follow my instructions like a soldier, terrified that if a single petal fell out of place, you would lose me all over again.” Tears began to spill over my eyelids, dropping onto the kitchen table.

She knew me better than I knew myself. She knew exactly the trap I was going to build for myself out of grief and loyalty. “You have honored my memory beautifully,” she wrote, the handwriting becoming slightly shaky toward the bottom of the page, a cruel reminder of her failing strength at the time.

“But eight years is long enough to tend to a ghost. The garden was supposed to bring you joy, not become a beautiful prison. By the time this purple flower blooms, I want you to understand that your shift is officially over. You are relieved of your duty to the past.” I turned the page, the paper slipping slightly in my sweaty palms.

“The rest of these pages are blank,” the final paragraph read. “They are for you.

I want you to plant vegetables you actually like to eat. I want you to dig up the daylilies if you’re tired of looking at them. I want you to let the garden grow wild, or pave it over and buy a boat, or sell the house and travel the way we always talked about.

You have spent eight years keeping my world exactly the same. It is time for you to build your own. I love you too much to let you stay frozen in time. Let the purple flower be the period at the end of our chapter.

Now, go write the next one.” I closed the notebook and buried my face in my hands, sobbing with a force that shook my entire chest. It was a release of pressure I hadn’t even realized I was holding. For eight years, I had been holding my breath, tending to a museum exhibit, terrified of making a mistake.

In her final days, Patricia had given me the greatest gift possible: the permission to let go.