Lost and Found

CHAPTER 1 - Joe's POV And just like that, she is gone forever. The funeral home is silent now, except for the creaking floorboards and the hum of fluorescent lights. Everyone else has gone. Joe stays, sitting alone in the front row, fists clenched around the will. His grandmother's will. The one that names him the sole heir to her B&B. Joe doesn’t cry. He doesn’t move. He just simmers. He's angry at the universe for taking her, angry at himself for not being there more, angry that he doesn’t even know what the hell to do with a bed-and-breakfast. He remembers the first time he fixed something in the B&B. He was ten. She handed him a wrench and said, "If you can reach it, you can fix it." He'd felt ten feet tall that day. She was the only person who never made him feel like a screw-up. He can still hear her humming in the kitchen, the way she'd scold him without ever raising her voice. She’d just give him that look, that knowing glance that cut deeper than a shout ever could. She had a way of making everything feel like home, even when everything else in his life was falling apart. No one ever made space for him like she did. He remembers the first time he messed up badly—broke a neighbor's window, skipped school, got in trouble with the sheriff. Everyone told him he was on a path to ruin. Everyone but her. She just sat him down, handed him a sandwich, and said, “You’re not the first boy to screw up. You just have to be the one who makes it right.” He didn’t understand then what that kind of belief in someone could mean. Now it feels like a weight he’s too broken to carry. After leaving the funeral home, he walks to the B&B. The front porch creaks. Everything smells like lemon polish and old memories. He stands in the kitchen, staring at the calendar she never changed after February. It's still circled: "Joe's birthday." On the table sits the teapot she used every morning, a half-finished crossword still waiting in its folds. Her coat still hangs by the door. Joe touches it, and something sharp and fragile cracks open inside him. She believed in him. Even when he didn’t. That might be the worst part. His throat tightens. He sinks into her favorite chair. For the first time in years, he wants to cry—but nothing comes out. He stares around the room, its corners steeped in her spirit, and whispers into the stillness, “What the hell am I supposed to do now?” He closes his eyes, lets the silence answer.