How she got sick fast and was gone in five months, and how the worst part wasn’t the dying, it was after — the silence of a house built for two with one person in it, the way I’d kept buying two of things at the store for a year out of habit, the way grief isn’t sad so much as it’s lonely, a loneliness for one specific person that no crowd on earth can fill.

Del didn’t say much.

He never did.

But when I finished he was quiet a while, and then he said, from under the transmission, “Trudy had a lump, six years back.

Turned out okay.

But I laid awake every night that whole spring doing the math you’re describing.