My husband chose a white casket for me. I watched him stand beside it on a hospital laptop while our premature son fought to grow stronger one floor below. Six nights earlier, I’d seen him drive away while I was trapped inside our burning cabin. He believed we were both gone. Now he was preparing to tell everyone how much he loved us—and I was preparing to speak.
PART 1: THE EMPTY CASKET
My husband chose a white casket for me.
I learned that from a hospital bed, watching the livestream test for my own memorial.
Grant stood beside it while someone adjusted a microphone. He wore the black suit I had bought him for our fifth anniversary.
“Can we move her photograph closer?” he asked.
A woman shifted the frame.
In the picture, I was seven months pregnant, smiling with his hand resting on my stomach.
My son was now one floor below me, learning how to breathe without help.
Grant believed we were both gone.
Six nights earlier, he had driven me to Cedar Ridge, my mother’s old cabin outside Bozeman.
“One quiet weekend before everything changes,” he’d said.
I was thirty-five, exhausted, and weeks away from giving birth. I wanted to believe we could spend two days talking about something other than Northstar, the air-medical transport company my mother had left me.
While Grant unloaded the car, I noticed the narrow pantry door.
Behind it was the old hillside shelter and its second exit. As a child, I had hated my mother making me walk that route every summer.
“You don’t need to be frightened,” she used to say. “You need to know where you’re going.”
At 2:17 that morning, I woke to smoke.
Grant’s side of the bed was empty.
I reached the front door, turned
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