Lina, the fixer, tried to build a bridge. She arranged a dinner, assigned seats, prepared a neutral menu. But when she asked her mother, “Do you still love him?”—meaning the ghost from the letter—Eleanor had simply walked out, leaving the front door open to the salt wind. Lina’s husband found her that night in the garage, not crying, but methodically shredding every photo album she could find. “If I can’t fix the past,” she whispered, “I’ll erase it.”
Write that scene.