Mike was the love of her life. Or, at least he was for this month. She, like she always did with men, fell hard and fell fast. Within weeks of knowing each other my mom was spending more time at his place than at ours, and after a few months our tiny home was packed with boxes.

I was used to the routine by now. After a while she would get bored, or he would finally show his true colors and then we would be back to where we started. Her always using me as a shoulder to cry on, and me always playing along. It wasn’t like I kept my distaste for her boyfriends to myself. I told her loud and I told her often that they were no good, but she never listened.

I was always too cynical, too young to understand. I didn’t believe that true love could be in the cards for her. And yet she found it, time and time again.

Mike wasn’t like the other guys. He didn’t smell like smoke and booze, or make her clean up his messes whenever she went over. He smiled at her, told her she was the one for him, even bought her presents. On paper he was a gentleman, the perfect boyfriend according to my mother. Maybe I was cynical. By all accounts he seemed like a good guy.

But there was something about him. When he looked at you it was like he could see right through you, a vacant but calculating look in his eyes. When I was dragged along to dinners or his house, each encounter felt off. There was nothing technically wrong, but I always had an itch in the back of my mind telling me to get the hell out of there. I only wish my mom had the same itch, maybe things would have ended differently.

It was ruled an accident. There was ice on the road and she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. The car had just slipped right off the road and down into the ditch. But I never believed that story, my mom always wore her seatbelt. When I was young she would idle in the driveway for however long it took before each person inside was safely buckled in. It also never made sense to me how such a bad accident could result one person losing their life, while the other walked away without a scratch. Just like everything with mike, it didn’t sit right with me.

He tried to keep in contact with me after, telling me how much he missed my mom and how much I reminded him of her, but I never responded. I took this tragedy as a reminder, an omen: trust your gut and always look deeper than the surface. The mantra plays in my head often, especially on days like today.

It had happened one year ago exactly. A faint echo of a knock at the door and the blue lights flashing through the front windows remained in the atmosphere of the house. I had just finished putting away the last of the plates in the kitchen, folding up the box and stacking it with the others. The moving company would be here any minute to take these to storage. I didn’t want them anymore.

I grabbed the small box by the door, the only one I decided to keep. It held pictures, mostly, but also a few small gifts that my mom had managed to afford to give me over the years. It was the last things I had left of her, or at least the last things that mattered. With a final look around I headed out the door, determined to never look back.