“It was horrible. I don’t think she ever really got over that. Finding him that way. Henry told me later that he couldn’t pull her away. She just knelt out there in the road, staring down at his little body. Henry said it was like she was in shock. He almost called 911, he was so worried about her. But she eventually snapped out of it, picked Charlie up herself, and carried him to the backyard. Henry offered to take care of it, but she insisted she would handle it herself and sent him home for the day.”

“What did she do?”

“She got a shovel out of the shed and dug a little grave for him, right near the blackberry bushes on the south side of the lawn. The next day she ordered a small, custom headstone made for him. It’s still out there.”

Eileen sighed and looked like she was thinking all this over. “I know it’s very sad, but do you really think…I mean, honestly, that how she felt about her dog would be enough…?”

“To send her over the edge? No, not really. But it is the most obvious thing I can think of that was a very big deal to her at the time. When I got home from New York two days later, she still hadn’t left her study. She slept on the couch in there and ate what little food there was in her mini fridge until I got home. And she stayed in there for the whole next week. It made me practically crazy. She wouldn’t listen to anything I said. I even went and got another puppy, from the exact same breeder Charlie had come from. She was furious with me, wouldn’t even look at it. Told me she didn’t ever want another dog again. So yes, it was traumatic, but I don’t believe Clare, even with all her eccentricities, would be driven to suicidal thoughts simply because her dog had died…even if she really thought it was her fault.”

“But?” Eileen asked. “Something was different.”

“Yes. I mean, she was always reclusive, but she completely withdrew. From me, from her editors, from her fans. She holed herself up in that room and wrote that book in the span she would normally take to write ten. I don’t understand it. Any of it. And I need to. I can’t shake this feeling, like somehow I missed something, something that could have saved her if I’d just been able to see it.”

“Simon, you can’t possibly think—”

“Can’t I? With all that change in her…and she writes a fucking book where the main character kills herself in the end? I am her agent, her husband…” He shook his head and felt the hot ball of grief building at the back of his throat again. “Why didn’t I see it?”