Her Hope: Chapter 20.

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Are you from the previous entry, waiting for the next chapter? Well here goes...

Story title: Her Hope

Chapter 20: The Will

Reza died on a quiet morning.

There was no drama to it, no sudden rush of alarms. Just a long night that folded gently into dawn. Ifa had been awake for hours, counting breaths without meaning to, memorizing the rise and fall of his chest as if repetition could make it permanent.

When it stopped, she knew.

She pressed her forehead to his hand—still warm, still familiar—and stayed that way until the room shifted around her. Nurses came softly. Words were spoken carefully. Time moved forward without asking permission.

Widow.

The word did not land immediately. It hovered somewhere above her, waiting.

The days that followed were practical in ways grief often isn’t. Paperwork. Phone calls. Decisions that needed signatures. Reza had prepared well—lists, passwords, notes written in his precise handwriting. Even in death, he had made things easier for her.

That hurt the most.

At night, the house felt wrong. Too large in some rooms, too small in others. She slept on her side of the bed out of habit, then drifted into the middle by morning, reaching for a warmth that was no longer there.

She was forty.

The number followed her like a shadow. Too young to be finished. Too old to start over without history. She had crossed into a life she had never imagined needing to learn.

One afternoon, three weeks after the funeral, Ifa opened her laptop and stared at a blank document.

Last Will and Testament of Ifa—

She stopped.

The cursor blinked patiently.

Writing her own will felt like admitting defeat, as if hope itself might be fragile enough to shatter under acknowledgement. But grief had taught her something vital: pretending did not protect you. Preparation was not surrender. It was kindness - to herself, to those who might one day have to make sense of what she left behind.

She began again.

She listed assets she had never thought of as worth listing. Savings. Investments. The house they had chosen together. She wrote instructions plainly, without sentiment. Practicality was easier than emotion.

Then came the harder parts.

She named beneficiaries. Her mother, her sisters, her nieces and nephews. In equal parts, and in it she added more clauses, in the event her mother was no longer, in the event if her sisters were no longer. 

She paused at the section about personal notes for beneficiaries.

There was no template for this.

She wrote slowly, deliberately.

I have loved deeply. I have been loved well. Thank you for all you have done for me.

The words surprised her with their steadiness.

She wrote about the life she had shared with Reza—not as a lament, but as a record. That happiness had existed. That it had been real and sufficient. That the absence of children did not mean absence of legacy.

“Our memories are my inheritance,” she typed, hands steady now. “And I am at peace with that.”

When she finished, she closed the laptop and sat back, exhausted but lighter. The will did not predict her death. It acknowledged her life.

Grief did not move in a straight line.

Some days she functioned with startling competence—answered emails, returned to work, rode her bike through familiar roads that felt both comforting and cruel. Other days, she couldn’t bring herself to move his mug from the sink.

She learned that love did not disappear when the person did.

It changed shape.

She carried Reza with her - in how she solved problems, in how she cooked without recipes, in how she listened more than she spoke. She heard his voice when she hesitated, reminding her gently to choose intention over fear. It would have been their 14th year being together.

On her forty-first birthday, she went for her little pilgrimage with her mother and her sister. They prayed, they hoped, they complained all they could to the Creator. They asked for ease, for divine blessings, abundance in goodness...

“We said we’d grow old together,” she said. “We didn’t say how long.”

The wind carried her words away.

That night, under a sky unburdened by expectation, Ifa understood something she had been circling for months: happiness was never a guarantee. It was a season. And she had lived hers fully. 

Widowhood did not erase her marriage.

It proved it had mattered.

In the years to come, if she stopped riding, she could always continue to drive instead. She will continue to travel, to see the world. Still plan, though differently now. She would age not alongside Reza, but because of him—shaped by a love that had taught her how to stand steady in uncertainty.

Her life was quieter. But it was not empty. 

And when the future finally came for her... As it comes for everyone, she knew this much with certainty:

She had loved. She had been loved. And that would remain.

Her future. Her hope.

/--- The End