Page 37 of Beautifully Broken
That was it.
The sob tore free without warning. Loud and ugly and real. It shook my whole body. Scraped out from a place that had been holding it in too long.
I covered my face, gasping. Broken. Let it pour out like it had been waiting.
I didn’t hear her footsteps, but I felt them.
Emily. Dropping to the floor behind me. Wrapping her arms around my shoulders the way my mother used to when I was small and scared and didn’t know what else to do but cry.
She didn’t say anything. Didn’t try to fix it. Just held on. Rocked me gently. Stayed.
And me, clinging to a cat and everything I couldn’t say, I let myself fall apart.
Because Hannah was gone.
And I didn’t know who the hell I was without her.
Chapter 1
Caleb
Present Day
There wasn’t nearly enough pickle.
I stared at the sandwich like it had personally let me down. Again.
It wasn’t bad, exactly. Just... wrong. The pickles were sliced too thin, the mustard a little too eager, pushing past its boundaries and bleeding into the center of the soft bread. Everything looked the way it was supposed to, neat, pressed, assembled with care, but it was still off. Too clean. Too composed.
I lifted the top piece of bread with a small, hopeless flick of my fingers, like maybe, somehow, it had fixed itself since the last time. No such luck.
I grimaced. Not in disgust, more like muscle memory. A dull pull behind my eyes, a flicker of resentment in my jaw. And still, I took a bite.
Because I always did.
Because this had been Hannah’s sandwich.
Ham, American cheese, mustard, extra lettuce, no tomato. She used to call it her "grown-up lunch," always with a smirk, like she was in on a joke the rest of the world didn’t get. It was plain. Predictable. Not the kind of thing you remembered after a first date. But it was hers.
I didn’t even like mustard. Never had. Still, somewhere between the casseroles and the condolences, I started ordering it. Somewhere after the echo of footsteps in the house became unbearable and the sympathy cards got packed into a drawer I never opened again, this sandwich just… appeared. Became habit. Ritual. A quiet nod to the woman I loved.
Eating anything else felt like moving on. And I wasn’t ready for that.
A shadow fell across the table.
A familiar hand slid a warm turkey panini in front of me. It smelled good. Too good.
I looked up as Emily dropped into the seat across from me, her bracelets jingling as she unwrapped her salad. She wore a yellow sundress that bared her freckled shoulders and a pair of worn cowboy boots I’d seen her in more times than I could count. Her hair was twisted into a messy bun, strands tumbling free like they always did. The sun caught the honey-blonde in them, and for a second, she looked like a country song; one of the hopeful ones, not the ones where someone dies.
“What is this?” I asked, already knowing.
She didn’t even look up. “What does it look like?” Her tone was pure exasperation, softened by years of friendship. She’d been my best friend since we were six. My person, my constant, the one who stood beside me when I married Hannah and stood by me again when she was lowered into the ground. Emily had always been the light in the darkest places.
“You were dissecting that poor sandwich like it owed you money,” she added, stabbing a pecan in her salad.
“It’s not that I hate it.”
“But you don’t like it either.” She paused, giving me a look I knew too well. “And I’m not letting you keep eating ghost-food forever.”
