A shadow crosses the window. As I watch, I listen to the messages he’s been leaving me. Asking me to call him back. Asking for an explanation. Offering his condolences. Et cetera. There, on the spot, I delete the messages.

I don’t send Edison Lam my banking information, so he mails a check to Simone’s place. I didn’t know they still had those. I burn it in Simone’s sink. She calls him to ask for another one. Which she keeps for me.

Leo sends me an advanced copy of Seb’s memoirs, to be published in several months. In the acknowledgments Seb has thanked me for being his caretaker and his friend. I burn the book, too, this evidence that I’m a good and worthy person.

People have been hurt because of me. Bonnie, Brazuca, and Nate.

People have died. Lynn. Mike Starling. Joe Nolan. The Zhangs, who may have deserved it. The baby, who didn’t.

In a moment of weakness, I call Nate and apologize for what happened to him over voicemail. I don’t hear anything back, and that’s about what I deserve.

There are times when I think of my daughter and then all the strength bleeds out of me when I realize I will never have a relationship with her. There’d been days when I cursed her for the darkness she came out of, what she’d represented in my life. She was the best part of me and I had spent years trying to forget she was alive.

I try to burn the brass key as well, perhaps to see if brass can burn, but Simone pushes me away before it chars and saves it. She gets a brand-new leather strap for it.

The key sears into my chest every single moment of every single day. It’s no less than what I deserve. It’s like a Stradivarius violin. Rare, precious, a piece of history to hold in your hands. But take away the history and you have an inanimate object. A violin is only as good as the musician. A key is only good if the door it opens exists. If you can put it into a lock and, with a turn, enter a room you long to be in. But what if the room and the door aren’t there anymore? Or, worse, they are but no one knows where to find it?

There’s a lock in Palestine that opens with this key, but I don’t know where it is. Some people sneer that Palestine doesn’t exist anymore. That sounds about right. There’s a group of people in Winnipeg who might share my father’s bloodline, but he never found them.

These are my thoughts in the wake of Lynn’s death.