The silence after the last breath

I’ve started noticing how a room changes when someone leaves—how the air settles into a different kind of stillness, like it’s holding its breath. Not empty, exactly. More like full of what wasn’t said. Today, I folded a coat for a woman who’d been in the same one for twenty years. The fabric was thin at the shoulders, worn down by habit. I didn’t know her name, but I knew she’d never come back to wear it again. That’s the thing about dignity: it doesn’t shout. It just stays.