So many things to know. It’s hard work getting to know a whole person from scratch. We’re such complicated creatures; we humans, and women are, to me at least, a six-dimensional puzzle with no frame of reference to work from. We’re so much more than the sum of our parts, more than middle names and favorite elementary school teacher and first kiss and which best friend betrayed you in high school and go-to sex position and which foods you hate and love and which musicians you love to hate and which ones make you cry because there are just so many fucking memories attached to that ONE particular song, which always seems to be playing when heavy shit goes down. For me, it’s “Satellite” by DMB. It was playing when I lost my virginity, and was playing when we broke up, and it was playing on the radio when we got in the wreck and my wife died. So now I can’t listen to it. I hear it, and I still love that goddamn song because it’s just so good, but each note sends a hail of emotional javelins slicing into me, a montage of awkward sex and tearful yelling and the moment I knew she was dead when that thick red blood of hers dripped onto the seat belt buckle and her eyes went glassy and empty like the eyes in a stuffed deer head.

Now I have to do it all over again, with her—the NEW her. Because the other her is still there, right? Inside, in the fibers of my muscles and the dark veins of memory. And now they have to coexist. The previous her loved Ol’ Blue Eyes, found his music unbearably romantic. Disliked Italian food because it was too heavy, too rich. Gotta keep it straight.

Fuck.

Damn you, Adrian Bell. Damn you. You were the one dying; so how the HELL did you get it so exactly right?

The bit about the song, that one song? “Found Out About You,” Gin Blossoms. Lisa and I danced to it on our first date in a dive bar, and after that it was ubiquitous throughout our life together, playing on a Bluetooth speaker on the balcony rail that one hot night when the A/C went out and we had slow sticky sex on a blanket in the backyard, and in the car on the way to the O/B where we found she’d miscarried, and yes, on the radio in the bathroom of the restaurant literally moments before my phone rang with the news of her death.

So fuck that song.

Because it’s still a good song.

I close the book and check the time: 5:58.

Gerbera daisies and chicken parmesan and not Frank Sinatra. How much is actually her, though? Nadia. She loves red wine the way his book said. And, actually, every detail about Nadia in the book is true of Nadia.