Some mornings I woke up reaching for Colton before I remembered why he wasn’t beside me.

I missed the man he had been at the start: attentive, funny, genuinely interested in my work.

Then I would remember how he had changed a thousand small decisions into one large prison.

My counselor asked me to describe what I missed without excusing what he did.

I wrote two separate lists.

On the first were memories.

On the second were facts.

I was permitted to grieve the first while acting on the second.