If he was going to have a sex dream about his wife, couldn’t he at least finish it? He flopped back on the bed and closed his eyes, but he knew it was no use. He wasn’t going to fall back asleep. His erection tented the sheet. God, it was embarrassing. Ridiculous. He had a boner for his dead wife and nothing to do for it, aside from the obvious. But he didn’t want to jerk off. He’d probably cry, and the combination was too pathetic, even for him.

He closed his eyes and tried to recapture the dream, but already, it was breaking apart, like fog. The hard-on stayed.

Ridiculous.

It had seemed so real. She had seemed so real. Missing her was a gaping maw, an ache in his whole body.

The clock read 3:06 a.m. The loneliest hour in the world.

Jen said dreams were visits from the dead, but to him, it felt like torture, to have been in that dreamworld and to have to come back to find Lauren dead.

Growing up Lutheran, he’d gone to services regularly with his mom—St. Paul’s, a beautiful old church in Providence with lots of stained glass windows and hard wooden pews. It was a nice community—his mom loved the outreach and community service they did. It was good enough in that respect, but the idea of God reaching down to help here and there, of an afterlife . . . harder to swallow. Maybe it was the science geek in him. Maybe his birth father was an atheist, and it was genetic. The idea that God was waiting in the sky somewhere, deciding whether or not to answer your prayers . . . it didn’t make a lot of sense.

He remembered when he was about eight years old, and a tornado had flattened an entire Kansas town. He and his mom were watching the news report, which showed only one house standing in the entire neighborhood amid acres and acres of rubble. “It’s a miracle,” said the weeping owner about his own survival. “My wife, she was sayin’, ‘Spare us, Lord, spare us,’ and the good Lord held us in the palm of His hand and saved us.”

In the house next door, the entire family had been killed, including a six-week-old baby.

“Why didn’t God save the neighbors?” Josh asked his mother. “Didn’t they pray?” Even then, he was cynical. “I bet the baby’s parents were praying.”

“God listens,” his mother said. “But He’s not a grocer, okay? Just because you pray for something you want doesn’t mean you’re going to get it.”

“So why pray?” asked Josh.

“Why not pray?” she answered. “Eat your broccoli.” She paused. “It’s nice to think that someone else is out there, someone who loves and understands you. And God helps us all. Just maybe not in the way you think, or the way we want Him to.”