That was probably the wrong thing to say. Thankfully the waiter came and pressed Alissa to scan the wine menu. After a minute of flustered indecision, she went with the Syrah.

We had a hard time finding a new topic to discuss. I knew she didn’t follow politics so I didn’t bother with that. Or sports. The Raiders’ draft picks held no fascination for her. She told me a story about Albert I’d heard before, which bought us a little time.

For a minute we devolved to talking about the weather, and then, as a default, we entered an ancient conversation, the genius of Weegee. We had rehearsed it for many years. We both loved Weegee and we could always bond over his images—the blackness of his blacks, the casual precision of his compositions. I was able to carry on my side of the conversation while tracing a whole other line of thought in the back of my head. I thought about the parent-teacher conferences I had to reschedule. The shoes I had to return to the mall. The small ways that Judy would have been bored by this topic.

The Weegee conversation followed its normal path. It was reassuring but also disappointing in a way. Afterward, Alissa excused herself to go to the bathroom, squeezing my shoulder on the way as a kind of morale booster, but I could tell she was disappointed, too. I felt dull. I couldn’t seem to think.

Out on the street, a car crawled by the window, scaring a gull that had been picking at wet crusts of bread. For the whole day I’d been assuming we would eat dinner and then go back to the cabin together, but now, suddenly, I wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t sure we would stay the night in the same bed at all.

I watched the candle’s flame float on the top of its wick, battered by the smallest air currents. I was finding it hard to breathe for some reason. My arms felt heavy and a cold, dry energy poured through my nerves.

The candle flame wobbled and reshaped itself. I wasn’t sure what was happening at first, but then I realized: it was Judy. I couldn’t see her or smell her or hear her or touch her, but I could sense her nonetheless through her profound absence. Her absence touched everything in my world, shaping itself to all that wasn’t her. It settled against me and, for a moment, I felt the weight of everything that was pitching toward her sucking gravity.