Rob never knew if he’d denied his feelings for her back then because he was afraid of hurting Bee or because he feared rejection, that Hannah would give him a definite no, flashing him the same frigid look she gave him every time he woke up in her house.

Even if Hannah had wanted more back then, Rob wasn’t convinced that the twenty-year-old version of him would have considered it. He was difficult in Syracuse, sometimes mean. He hadn’t liked himself very much back then. He would have never told her that he looked forward to those nights, and that he went through an unexpected withdrawal after he stopped visiting Hannah’s apartment in an effort to ease out of his life at school.

Rob knew that if Hannah were here now, she would say nice things about all he’d done for Liz. She would say the right things, just as he could save her from the pity party she was probably having in Annapolis. But she was miles away and a decade removed from their history together.

“I’m all alone on this one,” Rob said to the vet, more dramatically than he would have liked. He reluctantly accepted a tissue from a middle-aged female nurse who approached him with a box of Kleenex.

“What happens with the body?” Rob said in a businesslike tone, trying to overcompensate for his tears with unnatural composure.

“Well, sir,” the vet said, still sitting on the floor. “Some families have burial plans for their dogs. We have partnerships with two pet cemeteries in the area. I can give you a catalog with their fees, if you’d like to look. If you decide to go in that direction, you’ll leave Liz here and they’ll come for the body.”

Rob shook his head at the thought of a stranger taking the dog and putting her in the ground.

“I’ll do it myself,” Rob said. “I’m going to bury her in the backyard.”

Back at home, the ground was harder to break than Rob imagined it would be. Movies had led him to believe that backyards crumbled easily to make holes for burying mob men and murdered spouses. In reality it had been an unusually cold month in Austin and the ground was hard and dry. It didn’t help that his shovel was plastic and probably meant for light gardening.

It took an hour for Rob to dig three feet down. He paused to examine the ditch and tried to convince himself that it was deep enough for a burial, but he knew better and shook his head. The expression “six feet under” existed for a reason, he thought. He imagined a flood pulling Liz’s remains out onto the lawn. He kept digging.

It was another hour before he felt confident about the depth of the hole. Liz’s body was still in a dark sheet just a few feet from the opening. Rob sat down next to her and lit a cigarette. He spaced out the drags, trying to make the most of the moment. He kept his left hand on Liz’s stomach while he puffed, wishing her body didn’t feel so cold through the sheet. He tried to memorize the contour of her torso, the tender hub where he would scratch her belly before they both fell asleep.