It’s been months since she left us, but some days, it feels like yesterday. A hollow ache in my chest that never quite goes away. A ghost limb, the constant phantom pain of her absence. Mom. My beautiful, vibrant, laughing mom. After the funeral, after the polite condolences faded and the house grew silent, I needed something. Something tangible. Something that would still grow.That’s where the rose came in. A climbing rose, I remember her saying she always wanted one. I got a big, terracotta pot, the kind she liked, rustic and worn. And then, the hardest part. The ashes. A small portion, just a handful. It felt…sacred. Like I was tucking her into a perpetual garden.
I mixed them gently, reverently, with rich, dark soil, planting the rose bush in its new home. It sat on the patio, just outside the sliding glass door, where she used to sit with her morning coffee. Every day, I’d water it, talk to it. A little piece of her, still here. A promise that life finds a way, even after death. It was my anchor. My last tether to her.
My dad… he’s always been a quiet man. Strong. Steady. But her death shattered him too, in a way that was almost harder to watch than my own grief. He retreated into himself, a shadow moving through the house. We barely spoke, each of us nursing our wounds in parallel universes of pain. Sometimes I’d catch him staring at the rose, a haunted look in his eyes, and I’d think, he gets it. He understood what that rose represented. Our shared love, our shared loss. Her enduring spirit.
A man in a suit | Source: Midjourney
Then came the day.
I was in the kitchen, making a cup of tea, the familiar scent of Earl Grey doing little to soothe the tension I carried. Dad was outside, doing…something. I hadn’t really paid attention. A dull clatter, then a sharper, louder CRACK. My heart jumped. I spun around, tea forgotten.
Through the glass door, I saw it. The pot. My beautiful, sacred terracotta pot. Shattered. Not just tipped, not just cracked. But EXPLODED. Pieces of red clay scattered across the patio, like a crime scene. And amidst the shards, the dark, moist soil, spilling out, exposing the delicate root ball of the rose bush. The tiny, emerging buds, crushed and broken.
A man standing in a diner | Source: Midjourney
My breath hitched. My entire body went cold, then hot with a sudden, searing rage. He was standing there, staring at it. Not looking at me. Just staring at the devastation he’d caused. He had a shovel in his hand. A garden shovel.
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!” The words tore from my throat, raw and uncontrolled. It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation. A primal scream of anguish.
He flinched, finally looking at me. His eyes were wide, a haunted mix of something I couldn’t decipher – surprise? Guilt? Pain? I didn’t care. Not then.
“I… I tripped,” he mumbled, his voice raspy, barely audible. “The shovel… it caught the edge…”
An older woman in a diner | Source: Midjourney
Tripped? My mind screamed. Tripped? It was a heavy pot. It wasn’t sitting on the edge of anything. It was firmly on the ground. This wasn’t an accident. This was… malice. It felt like a deliberate act. He had destroyed her. Again.
“TRIPPED?! You just… you just destroyed it! You destroyed her!” I was shaking now, hands clenched into fists. Tears welled in my eyes, hot and angry, blurring the ruined scene. “How could you?! How could you be so careless?! So cruel?!”
He didn’t respond. Just stood there, the shovel still clutched in his hand, his gaze fixed on the broken pieces. His face was pale, drawn. But there was no apology in his eyes. Only that same unreadable, haunted look.
Cake slices on a counter | Source: Midjourney
“That was all I had left of her, you know that?!” My voice cracked. “A piece of her! And you just… you just broke it! Like she meant nothing to you!”
That finally got a reaction. His eyes, usually so placid, flashed with a sudden, dark fire. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again, a muscle twitching in his jaw. He dropped the shovel with a clud, turned on his heel, and walked back inside, disappearing into his study without another word. The door clicked shut, leaving me alone with the ruins of my hope, the scattered fragments of my mother’s memorial.
I sank to my knees amidst the wreckage. The terracotta shards were sharp, digging into my skin, but I didn’t care. My chest felt like it was caving in. The smell of rich, damp earth filled my nostrils, mingled with something else… a faint, almost imperceptible scent of decay, even after all this time. My mother. Scattered. Exposed.
A close-up shot of a woman’s eyes | Source: Midjourney
Why, Dad? Why would you do this? I tried to rationalize it. He’s grieving. He’s clumsy. He’s old. But none of it fit. The look in his eyes wasn’t accidental. It was deliberate. It was… knowing.
My tears fell freely now, mixing with the spilled soil. I couldn’t leave it like this. I couldn’t leave her like this. Gently, with trembling hands, I began to gather the larger pieces of the pot, placing them carefully into a garden waste bin. Then, the soil. I couldn’t just sweep her away. I had to collect it. Every last grain.
I started scooping the dirt with my bare hands, sifting through it, trying to salvage what I could of the roots. The rose was still alive, I told myself. I could replant it. I would replant it. She deserved that.
A person pouring syrup on waffles | Source: Unsplash
My fingers dug into the moist earth, feeling for the fibrous roots, for any tiny fragment of hope. The soil was cool, gritty. It smelled of life, and loss. And then, my fingers brushed against something hard. Something unnatural.
It wasn’t a stone. It wasn’t a root. It felt… smooth. Shaped. My heart pounded with a sudden, unwelcome curiosity. What could it be? A forgotten charm? A piece of the pot that hadn’t shattered?
I dug deeper, carefully, gently, brushing away the soil and ash. It was a small, intricately carved wooden box. Dark, polished wood, almost black. It was no bigger than my palm. I’d never seen it before. It couldn’t have been in the pot from the beginning. It must have been buried within the soil, a secret tucked away.
My hands trembled as I carefully lifted it out. The wood felt cool against my skin. There was no lock, no latch. Just a perfectly fitted lid.
What is this?
A smiling little girl | Source: Midjourney
A terrible dread began to coil in my stomach. A cold premonition. My dad. His strange reaction. The way he looked at the rose. The way he looked at me.
With a deep, shaky breath, I pried open the lid. It wasn’t stuck, just snugly fitted.
Inside, nestled on a bed of faded, velvet-like cloth, were two things.
The first was a photograph. Small, sepia-toned, curled at the edges with age. It was my mother. Younger, laughing, radiant. But the man beside her… it wasn’t my dad. He was handsome, with kind eyes and a charming smile, his arm wrapped around her waist, pulling her close. They looked so happy. So in love. My stomach dropped.
The second item was a tiny, intricately engraved silver locket. It was tarnished with age, delicate and beautiful. My fingers fumbled with the clasp. It sprung open with a soft click.
Woman with her daughter on her kitchen | Source: Pexels
Inside, on one side, a miniature portrait of the same man from the photograph. On the other side… a single, pressed, dried rose petal.
MY WHOLE WORLD STOPPED.
The air rushed out of my lungs. My mother. My perfect mother. My parents, who I believed had a storybook romance. My dad’s unwavering love. It was all a lie. A carefully constructed, beautiful lie that had just SHATTERED into a million pieces, just like that terracotta pot.
The rose. The symbol of enduring love. The rose petal, tucked away for decades. The man in the picture.
I looked at the house. At the closed study door. At the patio, still strewn with the broken shards of the pot, the exposed soil, and now, the raw, ugly truth.
For illustrative purposes only. | Source: Unsplash
HE KNEW. My dad. He knew.
He wasn’t clumsy. He didn’t trip. He didn’t accidentally destroy my tribute to her. He destroyed HER secret. He destroyed a monument to a love that wasn’t his.
My dad. The quiet, strong, steady man. He had lived with this pain, with this betrayal, for decades. He had grieved her, loving her despite what he knew, carrying this unspoken agony. And I, in my innocent grief, had unknowingly, cruelly, created a living monument to his profound heartbreak, burying her ashes, and her secret, in the very soil that was meant to honor her.
The rose was not a symbol of our enduring love. For him, it must have been a symbol of her enduring deception.
And he finally couldn’t take it anymore.
For illustrative purposes only. | Source: Pexels
The tears that streamed down my face now were not just for my mother’s passing, or for the broken rose. They were for my dad. For his silent suffering. For the monumental weight of a love that was never fully returned. And for the crushing, devastating realization that the man I thought I knew, the life I thought we had, was built on a foundation of profound, heartbreaking lies. My mother wasn’t just gone. She was a stranger. And my father, the man I’d just screamed at, was the most heartbroken person I’d ever known.
