How long can you mourn the loss of someone who was going to be your world?

Every day at five thirty, Bella sticks the key into the fussy lock, jiggles it to the right, to the left, and with a hard flick of the wrist, unlocks the door with a frisson of... something. It used to be anticipation, often excitement, but lately an undercurrent of dread laces Bella’s stomach.

She lets her briefcase slide down with a thud, pointedly ignoring the piece of misery hanging in a dark corner of the small hallway. The antique gilded curlicues framing the mirror she had once thought so quaint have completely lost their luster.

The first time she noticed it, the day after she moved in, she’d wondered why the owners would put a mirror in such a poorly lit area. Now she knows. And she doesn’t dare to move it.

She flips on the lights. Classic FM. Coffee. This was once Bella’s favorite time of day, curled up in the ugly but comfortable olive-green armchair and scrolling through her messages. Now the sips of coffee (black, always black) and the low sound of a cello concerto do nothing to quell the rising discomfort, the little voice that tells Bella you’re going to look, you know you are.

Still, she fights back while drawing deeply from the mug. I’m not, I’m not. She checks her bank accounts. Deletes spam.

“Okay,” Bella finally sighs, bowing to the inevitability as she shuts off Vivaldi. “I’m gonna look. At least let me finish my coffee.”

I hope it’s someone nice today. Bella tucks her hair neatly behind her right ear as she draws close. Because, yeah, mirrors were for looking at yourself.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. She wasn’t supposed to spend the better part of a decade weighing the merits of yes-move-out against no-stay-home. It should have been get-married-at-22.

But a drunk driver and a patch of black ice not only ended her chassan’s life, it also smashed to smithereens Bella’s idea of what she thought her own life would look like. Just like that, Bella was left dangling precariously after engaged with no married in sight, turning her into some kind of an aberration in society. It was almost like she was to blame for people’s inability to neatly categorize her. Not a widow (no sitting shivah for broken dreams), not an older single with a broken engagement behind her.

How long can you mourn the loss of someone who was going to be your world? Besides that one shadchan who thought a month was long enough (Bella blocked her number forever), general consensus gave her a year. (“Even the longest aveilus is just a year!”)