I’d been seeing Dr. Keyes for a couple of years, and though she tended to speak in Google search results, I liked her. So I did what she said, and we monitored it. For months, not just weeks, since nothing had changed, and I wasn’t ready to graduate from monitoring it to trying to fix it. On the night I dropped the man off in the Gold Coast, I went home and did what I always did: I lay in the bed next to my husband, hoping for sleep I knew would not come. After sixty minutes, I rolled over and let my feet drop to the floor, shifting my weight slowly so as not to shake the bed.

It wouldn’t have mattered if I did.

Keith wouldn’t be waking up until morning.

• • •

I walked around the bed and picked up the glass from the nightstand. Keith’s wheelchair was propped up against the window ledge. The shadowy image of our bedroom danced in front of my eyes—the antique oak dresser we’d gotten from Keith’s grandmother, the silhouette of his body underneath the covers—and it occurred to me that if I could just edit out that chair, everything would go back to normal.

With the drag of a mouse, I’d blur out the wheelchair and replace it with something like an exercise bike or a nice indoor plant. Better yet, I’d back up and erase the car that had sped out of the alley on the west side of Ashland Avenue on that balmy Thursday afternoon eleven months ago. Or maybe I’d crop out the moment, just an hour or so before that, when I had asked Keith to go to Trader Joe’s in the first place. I’d just made Ina Garten’s beef short ribs, and we only had white wine, and that simply wouldn’t do.

Keith had been tired and a little annoyed, but then I’d said something funny or cute, and the thing about Keith was that I could always get him with funny or cute, at least back then.

So he grabbed his keys and left.

Maybe instead of editing something out, I would have Photoshopped something in—for instance, the name of a different road on the street signs. We sometimes took Western Avenue instead of Ashland to avoid the traffic from Lake View High. If he’d gone that way, Keith would have avoided the speeding SUV altogether. In the grand scheme of things, the teen driving it hadn’t been going that fast. I always thought major crashes, the ones that defined people’s lives, happened on the highway at speeds at or above seventy miles an hour. The black SUV had barely broken thirty, but at the perfect angle, it was more than enough to spin Keith into the path of a bus that was in the middle of changing lanes.