Ten days of rationalizing where he might be. Of searching those places and not finding him. Of calling the police station for updates and getting nothing. Of calling everyone he knows but no one knows where he is. Of pacing. Of having hope, losing it, and then gathering up what’s left, like a barrier of sand that gets smaller and smaller every time you give into your subterranean fears and wash it away a little more with your private weeping. Of telling yourself stories to keep your loved one alive, the stories, a tattered safety net that loosely holds what remains of your sanity. Of watching your mother cry. Of praying.

On and on it goes, that broken highway line of time and sound, until the moment the ticking abruptly stops. Which coincides with the moment you realize you were wrong about the meaning of hell. That there is a hell worse than waiting.

And that hell is occupied by people like you, the wretched, whom have nothing left to wait for.

3.

The next morning, Kavita wakes in bed with a sharp throb needling the right side of her head. With slow blinks she clears away the cobwebs of sleep. Her eyes feel bulbous, as though reacting to an antigen. For an insular moment, she wonders why.

Then all at once, she remembers.

Sunil.

A rush of grief pins her down, heavy and fast. She hides her face with her hands, ashamed.

Sometime later, she resurfaces. Fills and empties her lungs slowly. Opens her repentant eyes. As she rubs the wet sleep away, she tries to summon up her dreams, but her memory is opaque. She went to bed wishing for dreams of him. She wanted to see his body move and hear his deep voice and touch him. She wanted to know: Was he okay?

Instead, she dreamed the same dream as she had since his disappearance. A dream full of motion but getting nowhere, like the futility of running on a treadmill. Always running, running, running through lifeless suburban streets she does not recognize, under the glare of an aggressive sun. Always panting, panting, panting in tandem with her heavy-heeled footsteps. Always searching for Sunil but never finding him.

But he has been found.

He is lying on a morgue slab somewhere in Montréal, with a coroner who is cutting and probing his decayed remains, identifying his body using dental records, and determining the cause of his death. Still, she dreamed of searching as if at some level she couldn’t quite accept that it was time to stop. Perhaps her mind had gotten used to the way she and her parents had kept Sunil alive in their fictions. Hope is hard thing to give up.

Guilt pulls at her insides, as though an anchor hooked to her soul. She has never been so aware of gravity, never so dragged by an emotion.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers to him. “I’m so sorry, my Bear.”