Lightening, Twice

Elaine slid the nozzle into the side of the minivan and squeezed the handle, the familiar clunk and whir of the pump starting up beneath her hand. She watched the numbers begin to tick upward, litres and dollars climbing in steady increments, the way they always did. Cause and effect. Comfortable predictability. You press, it fills. You wait, it finishes.

The late morning sun was already warm on her arms. She welcomed it. As a gym teacher, she had always lived comfortably in her body—strong legs, solid shoulders, lungs that knew how to pull in air and use it. Even now, after everything, her body still worked the way it always had. Muscles still responded. Her heart still beat. Some days, that felt like a gift. Other days, like a betrayal.

She rested her forearm against the side of the van and let her thoughts drift, as they had been doing more and more lately.

She missed him.

The thought was simple, unadorned, and constant, like a low ache that never quite went away.

Mark.

They had met at university, years and years ago, at a party neither of them had really wanted to attend. Friends of friends. Warm beer in red plastic cups. Too-loud music. She remembered how they had ended up talking in the kitchen, leaning against opposite counters, shouting half their sentences over the noise and laughing at how ridiculous that was. He had been studying engineering, earnest and clever, already talking about bridges and systems and how things fit together. She had liked that about him immediately—the way he saw the world as something that could be understood, improved, made safer.

They got married young. Too young, some people said. Elaine had never understood that criticism. They knew. They had always known. And they never looked back.

Mark built a good life for them. A solid one. A hard worker, he advanced in his career, provided for their family with a quiet pride that never tipped into arrogance. He was a good father, too. Present. Patient. The kind of man who showed up to school events even when work ran late, who learned how to braid their daughter's hair badly but enthusiastically, who taught their son how to change a tire before he could legally drive.

And he loved her. Fully. Openly. Without reservation.

Elaine closed her eyes for a moment, breathing in the scent of gasoline and summer air, and let herself feel the weight of that absence. The gap he had left in her life was vast, undeniable. She knew it would always be there. She had made peace with that.

In the back seat of the minivan, her children sat quietly. They had been so strong for her. Too strong, sometimes. She saw it in the way her son kept himself busy, hands always moving, fixing things that didn't need fixing. In the way her daughter—her artistic, sensitive daughter—watched people so closely now, as if trying to read emotions before they could cause harm.

They were grieving in their own ways. Elaine knew better than to try to rush that process. Grief was not something you solved. It was something you carried, learned the weight of, adjusted around over time. She trusted them to do that work. They were smart. Kind. Wise beyond their years.

She remembered losing her own father when the kids had been smaller. Mark had been there for her, helping her learn to say goodbye. Those lessons were still with her, but the loss of her husband felt so much deeper than the loss of her father. How could she say goodbye to the man who had kept her heart for her for so many years, who had grown into adulthood with her like two trees, trunks intertwined, sharing everything.

Her mind slipped back to the funeral, the finality of the moment. In an urn at the front of the church were the remains of her husband. Of her heart. He had died a week earlier, but she had died that day, sitting alone in the church. Her children, her friends, her family were no comfort to her. Comfort was for the living. She was something else.

The pump clicked as it slowed, nearing full.

Elaine thought, not for the first time, that she would never love again. Not like that. Not the way she had loved Mark. Lightning didn't strike twice. What they had shared was perfect, something out of a storybook, and she was content to let that chapter remain closed. She would be single, grow old alone. She would finish her days finding out who she was without another person at her side. She would do it happily, even with the ache in her chest, even with the quiet moments where she reached for someone who wasn't there.

She had accepted that.

Across the station, at another pump, a Subaru sat. A young woman stepped out of the gas station and walked toward the car—around her daughter's age, Elaine guessed. Ripped jeans, heavy black boots, a cropped top. Short blonde hair. Attractive. Modern. Elaine registered her and then dismissed the thought without judgment or envy. Youth was a season she had enjoyed thoroughly. She had no desire to return to it.

The pump clicked off. Elaine released the handle.

For a brief, inexplicable moment, the hairs on her arms stood up.

It was subtle. Easy to miss. A flicker of something like static passing through her skin.

Then it was gone.

She frowned slightly, chalking it up to the breeze or the lingering edge of emotion she had been carrying all morning.

The young woman from the Subaru approached, holding a small bag. She smiled politely and extended it.

Elaine took the bag from the young woman without really thinking about it. Her fingers closed around the strap automatically, muscle memory guiding the motion, even as that strange sensation lingered—like the echo of a thought she hadn't quite finished.

"This is his," the woman said.

Elaine nodded, offered a soft, reflexive smile. "Thank you."

The woman turned and walked back toward the Subaru, already reaching for the driver's door. Elaine watched her go, the disorientation still humming faintly beneath her skin. Not fear. Not exactly confusion. Just... a moment where the world felt slightly misaligned, as if two images had been briefly overlaid and then snapped back into place.

She looked down at the bag in her hand.

Roy's bag.

Something in her chest loosened at that thought.

She loved him.

Her boyfriend.

The realization came easily now, no hesitation attached to it, no guilt trailing behind. She loved Roy in a way that felt astonishing not because it threatened what she had shared with Mark, but because it didn't. It existed alongside it. Parallel. Separate. Real.

Lightning doesn't strike twice, she had told herself for months. She had believed it. Had worn that belief like armor, like a promise to the past.

And yet here she was.

She thought of how lucky she was. How unspeakably, improbably lucky. To have loved so deeply once was more than most people ever got. To find herself here again, heart open, steady, full; it felt almost excessive, like the universe had made a clerical error in her favour.

Roy had insisted on coming with her today. Hadn't framed it as obligation or duty, just quiet presence. "I don't want you to do this alone." And she hadn't realized how badly she needed that until now, standing at the pump with the bag in her hand and her husband's ashes waiting in the back of the van.

She didn't know how she could scatter them without Roy beside her. How she could stand on that trail, at one of Mark's favorite places in the world, and let go without someone grounding her in the present. Roy didn't replace Mark—never that—but he anchored her. He gave her somewhere to stand while she honoured what she had lost.

Elaine looked ahead, just briefly, into the shape of the future and found that she couldn't picture it without her boyfriend by her side.

The thought surprised her, but it didn't frighten her.

Maybe she was simply the kind of woman who loved deeply. Who needed partnership, not out of weakness, but out of inclination. She had been a good wife. A good partner. She was good at loving. Maybe that was not something she needed to outgrow.

She thought of her children then, the tension she could feel simmering just beneath their careful politeness. They weren't ready. They missed their father. They were still orienting themselves in a world that had broken its own rules by taking him away.

She worried about them. But not enough to let go of Roy.

This love, this chance, was not something she was willing to compromise. She hoped, fiercely, that one day they would understand. That they would see what she saw. That they would come to know Roy not as a replacement, but as someone new. Someone worthy.

Across the station, the Subaru's engine turned over.

Elaine glanced up in time to see the young woman slide into the driver's seat. The door closed. The car rolled forward, tires crunching softly over gravel.

A man's voice cut through the air.

"Tabitha?"

Elaine turned.

Roy had just stepped out of the gas station, drink in one hand, chocolate bar in the other. That man. Always thinking with his stomach. She smiled. His head snapped toward the Subaru, confusion already sharpening into something else—something panicked.

"Tabitha?" he called again, louder this time.

The Subaru didn't slow. Didn't hesitate. It reached the road, turned, and disappeared around the bend as if it had never been there at all.

Roy stood frozen on the curb, the colour draining from his face, his free hand hanging uselessly at his side. Elaine watched his chest rise and fall too quickly, saw the way his eyes searched the empty stretch of road as though willing her to reappear.

She felt it then—the pull. Immediate. Certain.

She closed the gas cap, the solid click grounding her, and turned toward him.

"Honey," she said gently, warmly, as if there were nothing strange in the world at all. As if everything were exactly as it should be. "Are you ready to go?"

And as Roy turned toward her, Elaine felt that earlier disorientation vanish completely. Whatever that moment had been, whatever had brushed past her and gone, it no longer mattered.

She had her love.

She had her future.

And she held it with both hands.