My phone was in my pocket where it had been all day.

I took it out, and the screen lit my fingers white.

One audio file.

Four minutes and eleven seconds, named only by a date.

“You don’t have to,” Ethan said.

“I know.”

I held my thumb on it.

The phone asked me a question in a little gray box, and I pressed yes.

“Gone?” he said.

“Gone.”

Below us a man walked a dog along the seawall, and the dog stopped to smell a bench, and the man waited with his hands in his pockets.

“We made it,” Ethan said.

I turned my hand over in the light from the lamp.

The antique gold band was scratched across the back from forty years of dishes and one flooded cellar on Gorton Street, and it still sat there, warm, going nowhere.