🟣 PART 5 — The Box Under the Bed
That night, Ellen couldn’t sleep.
Not from worry, exactly—but from knowing the end was coming. The kind of knowing that lived in the bones, not the mind. She didn’t cry. There were no tears left. Only stillness.
Rosie lay by the open window, facing the lavender. Moth curled beside her chest. Occasionally, the kitten’s tail would twitch, tapping Rosie’s side like a clock too slow to keep time.
Ellen got out of bed when the moon was highest.
She didn’t turn on a light.
Her feet knew the house by heart—every creaky floorboard, every spot worn smooth by years of passing. She went to the hallway, bent slowly, and pulled out the flat box tucked beneath the guest bed.
She hadn’t touched it in years.
The cardboard flaps were soft with time. Inside, wrapped in layers of tissue, were the remnants of lives once fully lived: Buck’s leash. Miles’s dog tags from his short stint in the National Guard. A half-chewed tennis ball. A birthday card signed in Miles’s shaky hand: To my best girl. The one with fur.
Ellen sat cross-legged on the hallway rug, lit only by moonlight, and laid each item out beside her. Not as a ritual, but as a reckoning.
Rosie was about to join this box.
But not yet.
She reached in again and found something folded—blue fabric, stiff at the seams. Buck’s old bandana. The one he’d worn during thunderstorms when he needed something around him to feel safe.
Ellen brought it to her chest.
Then stood.
—
Rosie blinked at her as she approached. Still awake. Still watching.
Ellen knelt and tied the bandana gently around Rosie’s neck, just above the faded collar.
“There,” she whispered. “So you remember someone loved you even when the sky rumbled.”
Rosie didn’t move.
But Ellen could have sworn she leaned ever so slightly into her hands.
—
The next morning was the kind that made you believe in grace.
Sunlight filtered through the window in golden slants, warming the wood floors. Lavender swayed outside with no urgency, like time had slowed to match Rosie’s breath.
Ellen made oatmeal and sliced one apple, setting a few slivers aside.
Rosie, somehow, managed to eat two pieces.
Moth stole a third and vanished under the stove.
Ellen didn’t stop her. She just laughed—a small sound, but real.
—
That afternoon, a letter came.
Not an email. Not a message through the shop.
A letter. Stamped and handwritten in shaky cursive.
It was from a woman named Joan, somewhere in Tennessee. She had lost her dog, Pepper, six months ago, and her daughter had ordered a lavender sachet for her birthday.
“I didn’t open it at first,” the letter read, “because I didn’t want to feel anything. But yesterday I did. And the smell—it was like Pepper had come home. Just for a minute.”
Ellen held the paper close.
Even Rosie’s scent, it seemed, had begun to travel further than her body ever could.
—
That evening, as the sun dipped low and painted the sky with lavender and rose, Ellen sat with Rosie in the patch.
The old terrier rested her head on Ellen’s ankle. Moth prowled nearby, pouncing on bees that never quite stung.
For the first time in days, Rosie’s eyes stayed open.
Ellen talked to her, not like someone preparing goodbye—but like an old friend catching her up on the world.
“The bluebirds came back,” she said softly. “I saw one at the feeder. Just like the year Miles put up that awful crooked pole.”
Rosie blinked.
“I never told you this,” Ellen went on, rubbing between Rosie’s ears, “but the day I brought you home, I nearly turned around. I sat in the truck for a full five minutes and said, ‘You don’t need this, Ellen. You’re not strong enough to love something that might leave again.’”
She paused.
“But then I looked in the rearview mirror. And you… you were just staring at me. Not scared. Not begging. Just waiting.”
She leaned down and kissed the bandana.
“You taught me how to stay.”
—
That night, Ellen sat at her writing desk and folded twenty new sachets.
Each one was smaller than usual. She called them the Rosie Batch.
She didn’t list them online.
Instead, she chose twenty old receipts—orders from months ago—and sent one sachet to each, as a gift. No charge. No explanation.
Only a note that read:
“Some things linger longer than pain. Let this scent remind you what stayed.”
She knew people would cry. Or maybe just close their eyes and breathe in deeply.
Either way, Rosie would live there too.
—
Sometime near dawn, the rain came.
Not heavy—just a soft tapping on the windows, like fingers asking permission to enter.
Ellen stirred in her sleep, then sat up.
The space beside the window was empty.
She rushed to the porch.
And there, in the center of the lavender, sat Rosie.
Not lying down.
Sitting.
Looking up into the rain like she recognized it.
Moth was pressed against her side, tail wrapped tightly.
The scent of lavender rose in waves through the mist.
Ellen stepped into the wet grass barefoot.
And as she approached, Rosie turned.
Their eyes met.
And Ellen knew.
This wasn’t the end.
Not yet.
But it was close.
And Rosie had chosen where it would happen.
Here.
Among the lavender.
With her scent already stitched into the world.