My knee-jerk defense is to ask, What is here? What is this life? But I know where here is. I know this life. My reflex subsides, and I’m left with the strangest sensation, both foreign and familiar, not unlike déjà vu, but much clearer. It washes over me, bringing with it the calm that comes from staring into a mirror and seeing my own face reflected back: visibility as proof of existence. I hear myself in her words, and in hearing them, I am heard. Through her, I am realized and made real, because I too understand what it feels like to work so hard with the singular purpose of getting someplace—to this life, this beautiful life—that upon arrival, having rendered the need for such work obsolete, having put down the struggle—a self-imposed struggle—I come to find myself hardly recognizable in my resting state.

These things flicker through my head, and then, as with déjà vu, they are gone. What a tiresome trail we break. I say, “Me too.”

The wall shifts from rose gold to something redder. Our house is silent.

“Elizabeth.”

“Hm?”

I don’t know what. “We are a team.”

She nods.

“This life. It will change again.”

She sits in this. We both do, until finally she says, “I think you’re right about it being time for Jonah to move on.”

I nod.

We absorb the space between us. “I’m ready to move on too.”

I nod again. “So am I.”

We sit here like this, soaking up our divide, as the sun goes down and the wall fades to ever darkening shades of dusk.

35.

I pull up to the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s complex at quarter of nine in the morning to find Jonah already parked in the lot where we’ve planned to meet. Well, look at that. For once in his life, he is early—early even with an hour drive from his mother’s house. I park next to him, and he moves from his driver’s seat to my passenger seat. No bouquets of flowering weeds from Vanessa this time. I wonder where Jonah told his mother he was going all cleaned up at this hour. He missed a spot shaving.

When I called Simone to say I was running late, she asked why, and I said family emergency, which was honest, but still promised her we’d talk today. She said she sure hoped so. Then she threatened to call in sick tomorrow and every day from now until the talk happened. My first thought was to let her, so I could fire her with cause, but then I thought it through and realized how right she is about how screwed I’d be without her. She backed me into this corner, so she’ll get her way, and this whole day will be one of talks and negotiations. Beginning now.