Ava wakes up on the couch. It is dark outside, but there is a hint of gray on the horizon, prophesying the coming dawn. She is still drunk. Her head throbs, and her stomach is roiling, and her hands tremble. Darcy, the little labradoodle puppy, is asleep at her feet, curled into a comma, his nose tucked under his tail; Bennet, the kitten, is draped along the back of the couch, wide awake, staring and blinking and watching Ava as she rouses herself to a sitting position.

The cable box shows the time in bright orange numerals: 5:08 a.m.

Something is amiss.

Her gut clenches, and it has nothing to do with the alcohol curdling in her system. Any home is quiet and still in the predawn hours, but there is a new texture to this silence, a foreboding, an echoing sense of…otherness.

Ava shuffles from the living room into the kitchen, peering sleepily around. Then to the hallway and the bathroom. She hesitates outside Christian’s office, but lacks the courage to open that door just yet. Their bedroom is empty, the bed made, fresh sheets turned down, pillows plumped; Christian learned how to professionally make and turn down a bed while working on that rich guy’s yacht, and has always been a bit anal retentive about it. She checks the master bathroom—something is missing. But what? It takes her bleary, wine-fogged mind a moment or two to figure it out.

His razor is gone. His shaving cream is gone. His deodorant and hair paste and cologne and toothbrush are gone. She checks the cabinet, and any item he used frequently is gone along with his stuff from under the sink.

She pads into the walk-in closet: his clothes are gone, the hangers empty and neatly arranged against one side of the closet, the shelves empty. His dresser drawers are empty. His watch collection is gone, and even the ceramic dish he’d made in fifth grade in which he keeps spare change is gone. All of his effects and belongings are gone.

Finally, she can avoid his office no longer. She stands outside the door for a long, tense moment. Her hand trembles on the knob. And then, abruptly, she twists the knob and shoves the door open, and it shudders and slams against the wall and drifts back toward her, catching to a stop against her bare toe. Empty shelves, clean desk—he was a messy writer, with pages of handwritten notes scattered everywhere, reminders on Post-its, bills half out of envelopes. His laptop is gone. The drawers are empty.

She doesn’t see the note at first. On a desperate hope, she half-jogs out the back door and out onto the beach. She scrunches through the sand to the place where he’d always sit and drink, as of late, a few feet up from the surf, close enough that water would lap at his feet but not get him wet.

Nothing but sand.

Back inside, to his office, and this time she sits in his chair. And that’s when she sees the note:

You look at me with blame in your eyes, as if this is somehow my fault; you look at me with disdain, as if I willed all of this to happen; you look at me as if you don’t even recognize me anymore, as if all of this has somehow irrevocably altered me on some intrinsic level.

You are not wrong, about any of it.

No, I could not have prevented Henry from dying; obviously I didn’t want this—I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy; of course this hellscape that is our life has changed me—how could it not?

It is not my fault.

Yet still, I accept the blame. I accept the disdain. I accept the distance in your eyes.

I accept it, because I am weak and empty and dead. I am a husk of a man, and it is better to be filled with guilt and self-loathing and sadness than to be so utterly empty and alone as I have been these last weeks.

Ava, my love: you have always been the best part of me, and through you we created Henry, our son, and in him I found completion and strength and purpose. Now that he is gone, I have lost those things, and I have lost you, and thus I have lost myself.

I’m sorry, Ava.

I wish I had the strength to go on, but I don’t.

Goodbye.

“Christian?” Her voice is tremulous.

Rushing, now, she rechecks everything, as if his belongings might suddenly reappear. As if he might suddenly appear.

Darcy is worried, following Ava around, sniffing her heels and nudging her calves with a wet, cool nose, whimpering. Ava stoops, picks up Darcy and cradles him to her chest. He licks her chin, and then her cheeks, and that’s when she realizes she’s crying.

She collapses onto the couch, clinging to Darcy, her shoulders shaking.

“He’s gone, Darcy.”

ErrrrrRUFF?

“What do I do now?”

Darcy’s head tilts to one side, and he whines in his throat.

For the first time since Henry’s death, Ava cries audibly, loud sobs wracking her thin frame.