Hadn’t I already inserted myself way too far into their lives once before? I decided I had, as I began walking in the direction of my car, planning to go straight to the Colony. But walking away—from my life, my marriage, and even someone else’s problems—wasn’t something I was capable of.

I tried to tell myself again that I couldn’t, I wouldn’t. But I had no choice, really. I could never live with myself if I didn’t tell him.

“Hey, Siri,” I said, “call Parker Thaysden.”

Parker INSTANTANEOUS NOTHING

PEOPLE TALK A LOT ABOUT widows, but you don’t hear that much about widowers. I couldn’t think of a single famous one. That morning, I tried to because Greer’s Us Weekly, the one that had autorenewed for the three years since she died, was sitting on top of the stack of mail. Same with her Southern Coast, a magazine her father teased her mercilessly for loving, since it was not owned by her family company, McCann Media.

Maybe it’s because men bounce back faster and move on with their lives. People kept telling me, “At least you don’t have kids. You can make a clean break.”

They didn’t get it. I wanted to be a father, and I would have given anything for a kid with Greer’s blond hair and fearlessness. My wife was born bold. She didn’t take any prisoners and took down anything that got in her way. Anything except for ovarian cancer, which proved to be her kryptonite.

I lifted my head from my cereal bowl and glanced over at the neat stack of large black Moleskine journals on the white quartz counter. Greer was a creature of habit, introspective. She was the kind of person life coaches would call “self-aware.” Those journals were part of her daily routine. Sometimes she wrote a lot. Sometimes a little. Every entry, from the mundane to the extraordinary, was a part of the woman who had been so steadfast and confident that I’d believed she was invincible. I never would have imagined that I would be sitting here alone at the table she’d picked out—like she had everything in this house—over a bowl of soggy cereal, in the small Palm Beach home we had purchased six years earlier. The view of the Intracoastal didn’t seem nearly as awe-inspiring now that she was gone.

As I raised the spoon to my mouth I could almost hear Greer saying, Cereal has no nutritional value. She would have been in the kitchen throwing all varieties of plant matter into the Vitamix, going over the day’s schedule, and making something that looked disgusting but somehow tasted amazing. Although she would have been doing that at six, not nearly eleven. Now I stayed at the office almost all night sometimes. I was in charge of Mergers and Acquisitions for McCann Media, which meant my days revolved around finding new publications to purchase and transitioning their teams into the world of McCann once I did. That often meant corporate restructuring, which wasn’t always savory. But someone had to do it.