Ellie has been dead for two years, and Walter still sets two places at the dinner table.

He talks to her empty chair. Tells her about the weather, the neighbor's dog, the crossword clue he couldn't get. Forty-one years of marriage built a language between them, and Walter refuses to believe the conversation is over just because one of them stopped breathing.

He's right. Ellie is still here.

She's been trying to make him leave.

She puts his keys in the car ignition. Opens every window. Knocks his coat off the hook three times a day. Pushes open the front door until the hinges creak. Every act costs her energy she can't replace, leaves her faded and thin in a way that has nothing to do with light.

Walter closes the windows. Hangs the coat. Shuts the door. Calls it drafts. Old latches. The house settling.

Their daughter Maggie drives three hours to confront him. You're wasting away, Dad. You need to get out of this house.

"Your mother's here, Maggie. I'm not leaving her alone."

Ellie pushes her own photograph face-down on the mantle. Walter rights it, touches the glass, and whispers: "I miss you too."

She wrote him a letter before she died. Hid it in her desk because she knew exactly what he would do. Sit in the house. Wait. Convince himself that staying was loyalty.

The letter says: "I need you to live. Not for me. The dead don't need anything."

Ellie has enough strength left for a few words in the fog on the window. She has to make them count.