Barry died of a brain aneurysm in the garage on a Tuesday afternoon in October. He'd just finished a sixty-two-mile cycling ride, pulled in, and collapsed reaching up to hang his bike on the wall mount. Sara found him four hours later, still in his cycling shoes.

She sealed the garage. Parked in the driveway for two years. Through snow, through ice, scraping her windshield at six in the morning rather than open that door.

Twenty-three years of marriage. She wasn't ready to open anything.

Then the sprinklers went off.

A construction site, no rain in weeks, no malfunction on record. The system soaked Sara and a steel fabricator named David Sterling, a blunt widower from Pittsburgh whose wife Jennifer had died in a car accident eight years prior. They ducked into a coffee shop and talked for three hours.

Two weeks later, an elevator trapped them together for forty-five minutes. Software glitch. No explanation. David asked Sara to dinner. She said no.

That night, the radio in her hallway clicked on by itself and played Sam Cooke's "You Send Me." Their wedding first-dance song.

Barry is matchmaking from the other side. And he is terrible at it.

A food poisoning incident that hit only David. A car that wouldn't start. A hotel double-booking. A dream where Barry appeared, fading at the edges, and told her: "You're not dying, Sara. But you're not living either. Open the door."

The garage door.

David, three bourbons deep in a bar, told her the truth nobody else would. "You park in the snow, Sara. You scrape ice off your windshield at six in the morning rather than open a garage door."

Sara opened the garage for the first time in two years. She told Barry about David. She felt arms she couldn't see and heard two words in her chest: "Go. Live."