To her left were two doors, both open to bedrooms. One room had a messy bed, piles of clothing and shoes at the foot, and a television on with no sound, cheery coppery faced newscasters trying to look serious as captions ran beneath them. Dune stepped in, no Big Lou.

She turned off the television. The bed was mussed in the middle from their sleep.

Grief was an amalgamation of absence narratives, layered over each other. Dune felt her own loss of Elouise and then she felt how Big Lou wouldn’t have Elouise to pile up soft next to him anymore.

Dune might never know this feeling, but she longed for it. Perhaps it was worse somehow to know it, to have this kind of old comfortable partnership with routines worn into weighted grooves, sagging steps on the porch, to know this and then not have it. She would never know.

She stepped back and peeked into the other room. Part of Elouise’s organizing was around reproductive health and this room was part of the story—it was meant to be a room for a baby, but Elouise’s womb had been riddled with painful fibroids and she’d been convinced to have a hysterectomy years ago. Now it was an occasional guest room with an untouched bed, but the star of the room was a crib that had been handed down several generations, lowered and turned into a small desk with piles of old paper stacked on it. The blinds were drawn on the window, as absent of life as the other room was full of it.

He wasn’t here, then. Dune returned to the hall, trying to think of where she might find Big Lou, crafting words to give him the news. She didn’t want to have the words for this. She stepped forward, past the altar, to the open double door of the living room.

At the threshold of the living room, she gasped. There was Big Lou, on his knees next to the massive picture window that looked onto the front porch of the house. He was facing Elouise’s back through the double pane, directly behind her, face buried in his hands, sobbing softly. How had she not heard him? Now the breath of his small sobs seemed amplified. Dune ran over to him and grabbed his shoulders.

“Big Lou, Big Lou I am so sorry!” Dune held him from behind and cried with him for a while. He didn’t notice her, he didn’t pause or change in his full body grief. She scrambled back from him then, her shriek loud in the room, realizing that she was alone again.

Fuck, Dune thought. Take me!

Her broken heart couldn’t take anymore. What was this disease that only seemed to destroy the will to live?

Was it her, did she make people sick? Was it all a punishment for her? What had she done, who had she wronged?