Ava is passed out on the couch, Judge Judy muted on the TV. Two empty wine bottles sit side by side on the coffee table, silent witnesses to her wine-soaked sorrow. She has spent much of the past month like that, drinking, watching TV, and picking at the occasional meal.

Christian has not been idle. He sold his Range Rover for close to market value, cashed out all their investments, sold the condo in LA, sold the apartment complex in Miami and all the other properties he owned. When his books started selling and the cash started rolling in, he decided to invest in real estate rather than letting it sit idle, or trying to monkey with the stock market. Ava knew about it, but had always been content to let him do what he wanted as long as they could afford the payment on her SL550 and splurge on the occasional purse. He’d invested wisely, it had turned out: he’d netted himself a net profit on the sales of all the properties to the tune of well north of twenty million.

He paid off the Ft. Lauderdale condo he and Ava currently lived in, paid off Ava’s car, purchased a life insurance plan for himself, and set up an auto-payment plan for the utilities and Ava’s car insurance. He split the remaining income streams—percentages from the film deal, which included merchandise royalties and gross sales percentages—between their joint account and his new personal one. The real estate money was his, so he kept the remainder after setting Ava up for financial solvency in his impending absence. Their personal account had contained a nest egg of savings, which he left alone; after setting things up he had enough cash in various offshore accounts plus royalty payments that he could function in luxury for a long time.

Then, he bought the boat. He’d come across the listing quite by accident—as an idle pursuit, he’d searched sailboats for sale online, and had come across a gem: a brand new, ocean-going catamaran for sale, with a ridiculous list of amenities and custom features, operable by a single experienced occupant.

Christian was nothing if not an experienced sailor: he’d left home at sixteen, hitchhiking and walking from rural Illinois all the way down to Miami, where he’d found work at a mechanic’s garage, which specialized in boat motors. Christian knew motors better than he knew anything, since his father had taught him everything there was to know about fixing an engine…along with how to take a beating. He’d shown aptitude and willingness to work, and had ended up finding a berth aboard a sailing yacht a couple years later, doing engine maintenance and learning to sail. He’d circumnavigated the globe aboard that yacht, and eventually became an expert sailor. When he was nineteen, he’d accepted a position as first mate aboard an antique schooner, and sailed from the Caribbean around Tierra Del Fuego and up the Pacific to Los Angeles, and then to the Far East sailing West. By that time he was twenty-two and didn’t even have a high school diploma. The owner and captain of the schooner, a reclusive millionaire, had offered to pay for Christian’s education, and so Christian found himself in Miami, finishing his GED and enrolling at the University of Miami.

He’d worked aboard a fishing charter while studying, and had planned to save enough for his own boat. But then he’d met Ava. One day, six months after they began dating, he’d written her a romantic little short story, just for fun, on a whim. Not a big deal, and he hadn’t even considered it very good. It had just been meant to make her swoon a little, laugh a little, and get him laid. Well, it had done all three with admirable success, and had also sparked an interest. So he wrote another short story, and another. And another. And then, a few months later, he realized he had nearly fifty short stories, and collated them into a single volume. On a whim, he’d sent it out with a query letter to a few dozen agents—and to his immense shock, he’d been accepted by one, an exclusive and premier agent who had immediately sold his short story collection with a caveat that Christian follow up with a full-length novel within a year.

He’d taken an idea he’d had for a short story, expanded it, and had a full-length novel within six months. It had sold as well. Not for a lot, but enough to prompt him to write another novel. Which had also sold, and through luck, timing, clever marketing, and aggressive touring, had ended up earning out in a year. By this time, Christian was twenty-six and in his senior year of college.

Then, toward the end of his senior year, his father had died. This sent Christian into a tailspin, but not out of grief; rather, out of a bizarre sense of relief, which had birthed a large dollop of guilt, which had in turn incited confusion and self-loathing, and like any writer or other artist, he’d turned to his craft for solace.

He’d produced a full novel within three weeks, and his agent had sold it in another week, for a huge advance, and that novel had gone on to go through several print runs, earned out swiftly, and garnered him praise and adulation…and a Hollywood film deal.

It had all been very surreal, and there was the breakup with Ava in there, which had also prompted a magnificent piece of angst and heartache driven prosodic brilliance, which had only cemented his status as a hot new star, one whose every work turned to gold.

He’d gone after success like a man possessed, churning out sequels and standalone novels with crazy speed, and they’d all done remarkably well, two more novels getting optioned over the next four years—of the four books he’d had optioned, two had been made into films, the first and second books in a planned trilogy, and it was the third and final book in that trilogy for which his editor was now clamoring so desperately. Producers were already sniffing for the manuscript, hoping to capitalize on the heat of Christian’s momentum.

Six years after that first novel, Christian has eight titles to his name, six of which were bestsellers. Two movies, both of which had done hundreds of millions at the box office, meaning massive payouts for him, since his film agent had been a wickedly savvy negotiator.

Six years. Eight books. Two movies. Millions of dollars.

And one dead child.

One ruined life.

One ruined marriage—well, one might argue two ruined marriages, since it’s Ava’s marriage as well as Christian’s, and they seem to be approaching it differently, at the moment. Namely: Ava is drinking and avoiding and curling further and further into herself, and Christian is about to leave her.

He buys the sailboat, rechristening it The Hemingway. He’s not exactly sure why he chose that name, only that it seems apropos.

His life has come to an abrupt halt, and it’s now crashing into a million pieces around him. He can’t write, can’t sleep, can’t do anything. His wife is lost to him, utterly. She won’t speak to him, won’t look at him, won’t even respond to the slightest stimuli. She drinks, and she stares listlessly at the TV.

He checks her blog regularly. She’s posted once since Henry passed, and that short post, all five hundred words of it, ravaged his heart and soul. He doesn’t know how to fix her.

He can’t fix himself. He’s not cried for his son. He can’t. He hasn’t slept more than three hours in a row in nearly a hundred days. He has no appetite.

Worst of all, the very sight of Ava makes his heart bleed, makes him shake uncontrollably. He isn’t sure if it’s hatred or love or a confused mixture of the two, but her presence makes him physically ill. Not out of disgust, but…well, he’s not sure. He can’t pinpoint it or describe it or make sense of it, all he knows is that she won’t even look at him. The few times she has, her gaze has been that vacant, icy stare she’d given him at the cemetery.

She goes there, every day.

He doesn’t. He can’t. His feet won’t carry him there.

Sometimes, he can’t breathe. His heart palpitates wildly. His hands tremble. He feels as if he might vomit, but doesn’t.

Everything hurts.

Henry’s nursery is exactly the way it was when they left to take him to the hospital. Nothing has been touched. The door remains closed. Once, while Ava was passed out, he tried to go in, intending to clean it out, but he couldn’t. One look at the rocket ships on the walls and the stuffed lamb and the spare binkies and the open container of dried-out baby wipes, and Christian had fled, closing the door behind him. He’d finished an entire bottle of whisky, and woke up alone on the beach once more, still drunk at 2 a.m.

Everything hurts.

The only thing Christian knows, now, is that he has to leave. He can’t stay anymore. He just can’t. He’s dying. Suffocating.

The guilt over leaving Ava will eat him alive, he knows this already. But if he stays…

Well, that’s just not an option.

He’s taken possession of The Hemingway, stocked it, moved the majority of his clothing and personal effects over to it; he’s gone over every inch of the boat a million times from bow to stern, double checked all the arrangements to make sure Ava will be provided for into perpetuity, for as long as the royalties keep coming in. There’s nothing else left to do.

He tries to wake up her. Shakes her shoulder.

“Ava.”

“Mmmnnngg.”

“Ava, wake up.”

“Nnng. Lemme ’lone.”

“Ava, please. Wake up for one second.”

She squints one blue eye at him. “What, Chris?”

He hesitates. Hoping she’ll give him a reason to stay. “I love you, Ava.”

She stares at him for a long moment, as if uncomprehending, and then she closes her eye and rolls away from him.

“Ava?”

“Don’t.” Her voice is muzzy, slurred. Sleepy.

More than likely she won’t remember this when she wakes up.

“I love you, Ava. Never forget that.”

“Mmmm.”

A sob tries to jag through him, and he clamps down on it, so it only emerges as a soft, whining exhalation. Had she heard it, she would have said it sounded like a hurt puppy.

There’s one last arrangement to make: Ava hates being alone, but more than people, the company she craves more than anything is a pet, but there simply hasn’t been time in the past few years for pets, and Christian never wanted one; it was a constant sore point between them, and a source of conflict.

So, he finds a labradoodle breeder nearby, Ava’s favorite breed. He buys a puppy, brings it home.

Ava is awake, drinking wine and watching Mad Men reruns. “Who’s this?” she asks.

“I’ve been calling him Darcy.”

“After Pride and Prejudice.” Ava slides off the couch, moving sloppily to sit on the floor, scooping the puppy into her arms.

He’d known exactly what Ava would name a puppy, if she were to get one.

The next day, he’s out running when he sees a little girl sitting at a table on the apron of her driveway, with a large transparent storage crate in front of her, filled with calico kittens; there’s a handwritten sign—free to a loveing home only take one if you will really really love it.

Christian takes one, brings it home, snuggling it against his chest as he jogs back to the condo. Once again, Ava is awake when he returns, a little after three in the afternoon, although she is visibly intoxicated already.

“This is Bennet,” he says, settling the warm little bundle of fur in her hands.

Ava stares at him, but says nothing.

Yet, she cuddles the kitten to her chest, nuzzling her nose into its fur. A tear slides down her cheek into the kitten’s fur, and yet Ava still only stares at Christian.

Darcy sniffs the kitten, and Ava scoops the puppy onto her lap, letting the two animals meet. It’s a heartrending scene, and Christian finds himself unable to breathe. Eventually, he turns away, returning to his office. It is empty, since he’s already transferred most of his books and his laptop to the boat. There’s nothing in the office, in fact, except the desk, chair, and a half-empty bottle of scotch.

Which he finishes, slowly, sitting at the desk, fighting the urge to smash the bottle against the wall.

He pens a note for Ava, using his personalized stationery and Mont Blanc fountain pen—once prized possessions which he now finds…gauche and pretentious.