The Golden Veil

The Golden Veil
July, 1948.
Lorenzo Montgomery returned from the war with a Bronze Star and scars that don't show on the surface. For three years, the scent of Clara's peach cobbler and the memory of her laughter were the only things that kept him alive in the trenches of Europe. He dreamed of the day he would finally walk up the creaky porch steps of their home in Willow Creek and feel her arms around him again.
But the house he returns to is a tomb of dust and silence.
Inside, everything is exactly as he left it. The rosaries still hang by the door; the stained glass still casts soft colors across the kitchen tile. But the woman waiting for him isn't the Clara he knows. Her eyes are hollow, her touch is cold, and she looks at him not as a husband, but as a stranger who has wandered into a house that time forgot.
As the summer heat of Georgia settles over them like a golden veil, Lorenzo realizes the war didn't end when he left the battlefield. Now, he must fight his most desperate mission yet: to find the woman he loves inside the ghost who has taken her place.
Can a heart remember what the mind has chosen to forget? Or are some memories better left in the shadows of the past?