The thought that she wouldn’t live long enough to pick out a house flitted through her mind, as fast as a hummingbird, here and gone. “I do like this one,” she said. “Or the brick one up here. Very impressive, as my genius husband deserves.”

“That’s big, all right. We could have ten kids in that house.”

“Ten, huh? Spoken like a man. We might have to adopt a few.”

“That’s fine by me.” He kissed her then, and she hugged him close, his mouth so perfect against hers.

“Break it up, lovebirds,” came Sarah’s voice. “Are you trying to make me jealous?”

“Why don’t we have dinner together?” Lauren said. “Us three. And get off Godzilla. He misses me, and if you break him, I’ll kill you.” The fatigue was heavy tonight, but she didn’t want to go home just yet.

They switched places and headed for Declan’s, an Irish bar on Hope Street. As they walked ahead of her in the deepening dark, Lauren had a thought. That someday, maybe, Sarah would be holding Josh’s hand. That she would be his wife. It would be good to know that Josh had a lovely, caring, smart woman as his second wife . . . someone who had known her and would understand that he would always love Lauren just a teeny bit more.

She rolled her eyes at herself and bumped Godzilla up a little faster. Not today, Satan. Not today.

5

Joshua

Three (or four?) weeks after Lauren’s funeral

March

FOR A STREAM of unmarked days after his wife’s funeral, Joshua Park, BFA in industrial engineering (summa cum laude), MS in biomedical design (ditto), and PhD in mechanical engineering, watched TV. Not his usual shows—The Great British Bake Off and Star Trek, the original series—but cooking shows that involved frantic dashes to the grocery store and making a dish out of rattlesnake and watermelon. Those docudramas about ancient battles. Alaskans looking for gold. People who cleaned hoarders’ homes.

He was fine. It was fine. The shows all put him to sleep, which was the point. Numbness settled in around him, and he welcomed it.

He ate. Or he didn’t eat. It was one extreme or the other—an entire pizza in one sitting, resulting in his feeling sick for the next twelve hours, or blurry days without food, marked by his phone; he’d set an alarm to feed Pebbles so she wouldn’t starve to death. His own intake seemed irrelevant. Back before he’d dated Lauren, and when they were first dating, he’d been like this—unstructured, eating to survive, not to enjoy. It had driven Lauren crazy. By their third date, she was organizing his life.

Let her do it again. Let her come back and get right to work.