The gray sedan appeared on the nineteenth of October. I remember the date because I had just finished canning the last of the tomatoes from the garden Lou planted before he went into the hospice unit in town. It was a nondescript vehicle, the kind that blends into the gravel of a Wisconsin county road like a stone. It sat there from six in the evening until the moon was high.

I spent those first three nights watching from behind the living room curtains. I didn’t turn on the porch light because I didn’t want the driver to know I was home, even though my truck was clearly sitting in the driveway. It felt like someone was trying to catch me in a moment of weakness. I started locking the side door twice, checking the bolt every hour.

By the second week, my nerves were frayed. I started keeping a log on a notepad by the kitchen phone. I wrote down the time he arrived. I wrote down the weather, which was usually cold and damp. I called the sheriff’s office on the tenth day, but they said there wasn’t much they could do since he was parked on a public road and hadn’t stepped out of the car.

The silence of the house had been hard enough to manage since the funeral in May. Lou was a man of few words, but he filled the rooms just by existing.

Without him, the house felt like a shell. Having that car out there made the emptiness feel heavy, like a physical weight sitting on my chest. I stopped eating dinner in the dining room and moved to the kitchen island, just to be closer to the deadbolt.

On the nineteenth day, the patience I’d been holding onto snapped. It was a Thursday. The air had a bite to it, the kind that signals a hard frost is coming. I watched him pull into that same spot at 6:12 PM. The engine clicked off, and the interior light stayed dark.

I didn’t think about my safety. I didn’t think about the sheriff’s advice to stay inside. I just felt a surge of tired, hollow anger. I pulled my robe tight around my waist, stepped into my slippers, and walked out the front door. The gravel crunched loudly under my feet, sounding like gunshots in the quiet night.

I marched straight to the driver’s side window. I didn’t wait for him to acknowledge me. I rapped my knuckles hard against the glass, three sharp strikes. I expected him to drive off, or maybe to yell, but he just reached over and rolled the window down with a mechanical hum.

He was older than me, maybe seventy, with hands that looked like they had spent a lifetime working on engines. He wore a faded navy hat. He didn’t look like a threat. He looked tired, the same way I felt.