This is almost normal, sitting around the table amid boxes of pizza, Sam and Leo arguing about who has the best soccer team, Sonia educating us on the ins and outs of cow milking and stable mucking. If I close my eyes, Patrick isn’t slumped in his chair, almost shrunken, and Steven is working his way into a sixth slice, crust and all. There’s chatter, and arguing, and interruptions. All that normal family-dinner shit.

Except it isn’t.

Patrick had more to drink than he should have. Steven picked off the pepperoni on a single slice and made piles of it on the side of his plate. And me? Tiredness has become an endless song, a never-ending loop of exhaustion running through my head and my limbs, pulling me down.

Then again, this is my chance, and it happened all by itself.

I put Patrick to bed—no small feat given his bulk and my fatigue—and read Sonia a story. She’s asleep before Winnie-the-Pooh gets himself stuck in Rabbit’s house.

Good for you, kid, I think.

The little clock on her nightstand tells me it’s eight—too early for the twins to be in bed, and way too early for Steven. I go to check on the three of them.

Sam and Leo are teaching each other card tricks in the den—also a normal thing. Steven, when I knock on his bedroom door, says he wants to be alone for a while. To tune out, he tells me through the thick walls.

This makes me think of Olivia.

“You sure you’re okay?” I say. What I don’t say is Don’t do anything stupid, kiddo.

Maybe he’s read my mind; maybe he’s got more sense than I’m giving him credit for. “I’m not gonna—you know.”

Nothing like having a little pre-bedtime suicide chat with your son, I think, and go find Patrick’s keys.

My husband has a nightly ritual: an hour in his study with a beer after dinner, teeth brushing, and—on occasions that have grown rarer over the years and as scarce as hen’s teeth in the past twelve months—sex. At some point between his study time and crawling into bed, he locks his keys in a steel safe in his nightstand, the kind of box with a keypad you see in hotel rooms.