DOSSIER.
An old tale goes that a soldier sits face to face with death after challenging him to a game of chess. If he loses, the grim reaper takes his dues, if he wins... well--- the soldier is typically more focused on trying to reach the outcome then what comes of it. Sometimes Emilie feels like she's sitting at that table, but every time she tilts her head to try to see the figure under the hood the face changes and with it the game. Any momentary distraction enough to clear the table. Chess. Cards. Tag. The day her husband died, she looked down to see an empty table, and up to see an empty chair. Death had never sat at her kitchen table, not in the literal sense at least, but it appeared on her telephone. A slip on ice, a bad fall. Three hours in a stiff hospital chair later and she didn't have to perform her shock as she walked out alone spinning a now meaningless ring around her finger.
It's been six years, almost to the day. Her daughter's memories of the man are hazy at best, and Emilie makes little effort to stoke them as life rolls ever onward. She reinvents, the way she did when she left home, when she arrived in Hatchetfield, and when she married a man she did not love because she was afraid that she couldn't raise a baby alone. They get a place of their own, somewhere that he's never touched, and it stops being a soulless house and for the first time somewhere feels like home. She finds herself in pieces. Echoes buried in the things she finds and the things she rids herself of before she settles into the new normal. The last credits of her masters degree attained, and needing something more than counting the hours until Hails returned from school, she turns to teaching. Maybe not her passion, but it gives her something. A reason to work with her hands, to be in her field. A place to land until she can find her new direction.