No matter how many times he toured the forest, he could find no hole and he could find no Mia. There was nothing. She was nowhere. After two weeks, he was as afraid of finding her as he was of not finding her. There was more than one occasion when he mistook the pale glow of a mushroom for dead flesh. When he slept—in fitful patches—he curled up in the cab of his pickup, the windshield fogged over from his barking sobs.

He tried to blame the cops. But the cops were his wife. Though Nora wasn’t allowed to work directly on the case, she was consulting on it, and she assured him every t was being crossed, every i dotted. Given her bossy perfectionism, he believed her. But even so, he couldn’t help but scream at her. He reacted by being overly emotional, and she responded by buttoning down all feeling. To him, her face was an expressionless mask, unmoving except for the tic she developed in her cheek. When he tried to apologize, when he pulled her into a hug, she stiffened—and so he shoved her back. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you feel anything?” he said, and she calmly asked him if he thought her grief was any less than his own. Was she one to ignore details and let things slide? No, she was definitely not. He believed her, of course. There was no one on this planet more particular than she. This was the woman who used a timer when brushing her teeth, who vacuumed carpets into neat stripes, who showed up ten minutes early to everything, who organized the apps on her phone in alphabetical order, and who had diligently taught Mia to read, add, and subtract by the time she was three.

Nora didn’t suspect him—despite all the questions he faced—but she blamed him. How could she not? He blamed himself. Probably their marriage was already doomed—they had been fighting off and on for some time—but this certified the end. There was no recovering from a lost child. Being together only reminded them of what they’d lost. She filed for divorce, and he signed the papers without protest.

In the time that followed, he regularly missed classes and office hours and faculty meetings. He often neglected to grade the homework he had assigned. Late one night, in the campus lab, he drank too much and fell asleep on the floor; a grad student discovered him in a puddle of his own urine. His teaching ratings plummeted.