Mom reexamines the card. “Oh. Hah.” Then a minute later: “Have you looked on Hulu for The Mentalist? Sometimes when I can’t find something, it’s on Hulu.”

Watching everyone, I don’t think they would have enjoyed the extravagant gifts nearly as much as they’re enjoying (well, with the exception of Mom, whose humor doesn’t quite match mine, but you can’t please everyone) these extremely stupid homemade cards.

Grandma reads hers aloud, mouth tilted. “You’re my abettor half! See you at the trial. Imagine getting something like this in the mail. Watch your back, Hallmark.”

I smile at her, but Hallmark makes me think of Hall and how much he’d love this tableau. My eyes burn with tears. How dare he not be here for this.

It’s so utterly unfair.

One by one, members of my family notice his absence, and question me about it. I expect to be berated—What’d you do to screw it up?—so it knocks me off my balance when they’re supportive instead. Marilou brings me a waffle, even though my appetite has shriveled up. Dad asks if I’d like to help him with a puzzle. Grandma forces me to wear her lucky wig (a platinum bob with green glitter), and Grandpa whips up a bucket’s worth of hot chocolate and passes me a handkerchief for my damp eyes.

Their unexpected affection prompts me to blubber, which I do privately in the kitchen pantry with my waffle (I’m not hungry, but maybe eating something sweet will help, I tell myself).

While I’m sagging against a box of Ritz crackers in the dark closet, soaking the scarf around my neck with tears, it hits me: Maybe I can bring him back somehow. Maybe if my behavior is really, really good, the mystical cosmos will reward me with Hall, but this time he’ll be here for keeps, and then I can properly tell him how I’ve grown to feel about him. We’ll have more than just two kisses.

“Everything all right?” Mom asks when I cut back through the living room on my way upstairs.

“It will be,” I reply firmly, thundering up the staircase with purpose. I don’t have to be sad. This can all be temporary.

I whisk into my bedroom, which is exactly as it was when we arrived: cramped, dim, with an odor of disuse. It contains a single twin bed and one flat pillow. It’s as if Hall was never here at all.

I haven’t accessed the Internet in days, haven’t Googled myself. This is the longest social media hiatus I’ve ever taken, and my fingers itch to log into those portals to hell when I open my phone. Like an addiction. But those spaces haven’t been healthy for me, which is more evident than ever now that I’ve gotten some distance from them and feel better about myself. Hall’s wall-to-wall schedule of activities for this week has incited a cleanse—now that I’ve gotten a taste of what it feels like to not care so much about what others are saying about me, I want to keep that streak going.