We began on the small things, the safe things, sorting them into careful piles.

But I lasted less than an hour before the weight of it crushed the breath out of me — a shirt that still, impossibly, smelled faintly of my son; a movie ticket stub in a jacket pocket from a night I could suddenly see in perfect detail — and I fled to the kitchen on the excuse of starting dinner hours too early, just to have a reason to be out of that room.

Abigail let me go.

She understood.