“My fiancé died a month before our wedding,” it started, “and now I’m going on our honeymoon alone to see if life is worth living.”

On my third day in London, I woke up early — 1:18 p.m., barely afternoon. Grief throws you out of time, you lose yourself in memory and mourning, but the devices of the modern world will re‑mind you of the time down to the minute.

I knew I needed to get out and experience the city, but I was struggling. Doesn’t matter what you do, Laura, I told myself, just put on pants and walk out the door.

I got dressed. I had a cappuccino at the hotel lobby bar. I stepped into the street. I didn’t know where to go, so I started wandering. My hotel was in a wealthy neighbourhood. The streets were crowded with young and well‑ dressed people. This isn’t Corner Brook, I thought, and that thought was comforting. So I walked. And walked. And walked.

I ended up at a place called Seven Dials Market, a high‑end food court in a converted warehouse. It was packed. Music was blaring. I thought it would be easy to find a nice place to eat, but I descended into grief brain and ended up circling through the place several times before I noticed a stall selling corn tacos and margaritas, both gluten‑free. I took a picture of my tacos when I sat down, so I know what time it was: 4:47 p.m. I had walked for close to three hours. I was seven blocks from my hotel.

I went back to the Hoxton after “breakfast.” I didn’t have the energy for anything else. I looked at photos of Devon on my phone. I watched a few videos I had taken: my “morning” coffee, a crowded street, my breakfast tacos and alcohol. I spent a few hours making a second post for my TikTok account. I wrapped myself in Devon’s sweatshirt, pulled up my beloved murder documentaries, and fell asleep again.

When I woke up, it was almost midnight. I headed out to Wingstop, something haters on the internet would spend months mocking me for because they thought chicken wings were gluten bombs, even though the non‑ breaded ones are (mostly) gluten‑free.

Tragically, the Wingstop was closed. Oh, come on, I did not have the energy for this. But then, as I was wandering down a busy street, FaceTiming with my father, I saw it, beaming out in all its ultra‑yellow glory, the ultimate comfort hole … McDonald’s.

I was standing on the corner, waiting for the walk signal, when I noticed three girls staggering toward me. Clearly Americans, and clearly drunk.

Just do it, Laura. Just talk to them.

I suppose I should mention I was wearing pyjama bottoms and Devon’s Mohammad Ali sweatshirt. They were nice pyjama bot‑toms, but they weren’t appropriate for an evening stroll in central London. I didn’t care. My superpower, at least for this first part of the trip, was that I didn’t care about anything.

I struck up a conversation. The girls were also headed to McDonald’s. We decided to go together.

The last thing everyone said to me before I left Newfoundland was, for the love of god, don’t tell anyone you are a young woman travelling alone.

It took me about two minutes of dodging questions to realize that was impossible. So I told the girls I was alone, and then I told them why I was alone, and then I trauma dumped on those poor girls, right there in the harsh lights of a London McDonald’s. It was the first time I had ever talked about Devon with anyone who didn’t know him. I’d like to tell you it felt good or bad or … something, but at the time, it just felt necessary.

The girls were kind. A bit of drunken fawning, but they seemed sincerely moved. One of them invited me shopping the next day. She was on a semester abroad from a California state university, and she was living in a big building full of girls on semesters abroad from various California state universities. She wanted to go to a famous vintage boutique, so eight of us bundled onto a big red London bus. The shop was closed, so four of us decided to walk to Camden Market. Well, they decided. I tagged along.

It was clear I didn’t have much in common with these girls. They were nineteen, maybe twenty. They were focused on Instagram, legal drinking, and complaining about homesickness and boys. I was a twenty‑eight‑year‑old widow trying to figure out how to get through a day. But they were nice. And it was nice to be with other people. And I think I fooled them. I think I came off like a normal human being.

We were walking along a fancy canal, with London hovering above us, when I happened to glance at my phone. The TikTok I posted on my second day in London had six hundred thousand views.

“Oh my god,” I said. “I think my social media is blowing up.”

A week after Devon died, I asked my father to find someone who had lost a partner at my age. My closest friends were engaged, married, or having babies. How could they understand what it was like to have those things torn violently away? To lose everything I cared about in an instant?

“I need to know,” I told my father, “that it’s possible to go on.”

The woman he found was in her fifties. She was a grief counsellor who had, in her early thirties, lost her husband in a notorious helicopter crash that killed ten workers on their way to an oil rig off the north coast. She still lived in their house, with his things. She couldn’t bear the thought of selling them. She had recently started her first serious relationship since his death.

No, I thought. I don’t want that. I don’t want to grieve for the rest of my life. I couldn’t imagine loving anyone but Devon. I still can’t. But still … I turned to books. Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” made my grief feel seen. “The Hot Young Widows Club” was almost the exact opposite, and almost as good. I found some comfort in the author’s podcast, “Terrible, Thanks for Asking.”

My brother sent me a link to a TikTok account a friend recommended. The woman had lost her husband young. It should have helped. But she had kids. My children are my reason for going on, she said, for getting up and living every day.

But what if you don’t have children? What’s your reason then?

It was a TikToker from New Zealand named Kelsey Mulcahy who pulled me off the edge. Kelsey lost her fiancé unexpectedly, in an accident while living abroad in England. Six weeks later, she moved to Australia with her best friend. She needed a fresh start. She needed to keep momentum. It was sink or swim. That’s how Kelsey said it: You’re going to sink unless you swim.

A few months later, she posted about a trip to Africa. She had planned it with her fiancé, but she went with her father. Those pictures, their smiling faces, shifted something in me. Kelsey was my age, she didn’t have children, she was finding a way. She was creating a life for herself, doing the things she and her fiancé had meant to do together. Her posts were sad, even after her trip. But as she neared the two‑year mark, Kelsey was posting about finding joy. Despite her grief, she was building a beautiful life.

Twenty‑four months to learn to swim again?

I mentioned to my friend Reb the possibility of documenting my journey on TikTok. “You should,” she said immediately. “Yeah, Laura, you definitely should.” Reb lives online, but not in a bad way.

I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. I’m a private person, and I was low, low, low. “It will be good for you, Laura,” Reb said. “And that way, we can follow you from here.”

I thought about it for a few days, and I realized Reb was right. If I made myself post a TikTok every day, I’d have to leave my hotel every day, or it would be pathetic. I didn’t mind sad. I was sad. I didn’t want to be pathetic.

Before I left, I posted once, as practice. It was a slide show, photographs of Devon. The post got a couple hundred views. Which felt right. There were a lot more than a hundred people who loved Devon, but less than a hundred people who would follow me.

I was going to post my TikToks privately, for my friends and family. But then I thought of Kelsey Mulcahy, and I thought that maybe my pain could spark a fire in someone the way her pain had sparked a brittle flame in me. So I made it public, and I started with that explanation: “My fiancé died a month before our wedding, and I’ve gone on our honeymoon alone to see if life is worth living.”

Two days later, the post had two million views. It’s hard to explain how much that meant to me, not because I was suddenly “famous” — I was not — but because it made me feel less alone. I had a great support network. Everyone rallied around me when Devon died. My parents. Devon’s parents. My brother flew home from Toronto. My sister, Tamara, who was twelve years older and had always looked after me, slept spooned around me every night. Devon’s sister, Kathleen, one of the kindest people I have ever known (second only to Devon), stayed for a week and never blamed me for the death of her favourite person in the world, not once.

And yet I felt alone. Like the world was swirling around me, all these colours, all these chattering people, but I was dropping out of it, curling away, recoiling from its touch. Somehow it was the kindness of strangers, the thousands who sent me a message in the hours after that post, and especially the young women who had lost a partner, who saw me because they were dealing with the same isolation and pain, that poked a finger through the rhinoceros armour of my grief.

There were negative comments. People accused me of cashing in on tragedy. Know‑it‑alls lectured me about gluten. (Really, was that the point?) One girl said I was a fraud, that if I truly loved Devon I wouldn’t be on vacation, I’d be home in bed or, even bet‑ter, dead. That’s what she’d do: She’d kill herself if her partner died.

Most of the comments, though, were positive. People took the time to tell me I was brave, I was inspiring, which struck me as funny, because I was trying to show them what my trip was really like: crying in my hotel room, wandering in a grief‑stricken fog, bingeing murder documentaries, eating at McDonald’s in my pyjamas … What was so brave about that?

Excerpted from “The Solo Honeymoon: A Brief Beautiful True Love Story” by Laura Murphy. Copyright © 2026 Laura Murphy. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.