He thanked me for understanding, relieved, and went out through the front door into the cold, and I sat down that night with the photographs glowing on my phone and understood that Shirley had made her move.

Now it was time to make mine.

I slept very little that night, but the sleeplessness had changed its character entirely.

For two weeks I had lain awake in grief, hollow and passive, a thing that had happened to me.

Now I lay awake with a purpose, turning the photographs over in my mind, thinking through the order of things, planning — and I realized, somewhere in the small hours, that I was doing exactly what Lawrence used to do, staring at the ceiling and running the moves.

Grief had made me a passenger.