This one was a word, and a duty, and I took it.

Chapter 10 — The Low Hour

I will not pretend the grief moved in a straight line, because it did not, and anyone who has done this knows it does not.

In February it came back for me all at once.

It was nothing.

It was that I reached into her apron pocket, the work apron that still hung on its hook because I could not make myself take it down, and my fingers found a grocery list in her handwriting — milk, thread, the good bread, call Robin — and the ordinariness of it, the call Robin, the fact that she had been alive enough to need milk and to mean to call our daughter, took my legs out from under me.

I locked the door.