The house with one person in it.” He reached over, in the dark, and gripped my shoulder once, hard, and let go.

“I’m glad you came to Coldwater, Walt,” he said, to the underside of a truck.

It was the first time in four years anyone had been glad I was anywhere.

I did not cry, quite, under that truck, though it was close.

What I felt instead was something I can only call relief, the specific relief of finally setting down a weight you’d carried so long you’d stopped noticing it was a weight and started thinking it was just the shape of you.

For four years I had been the sole keeper of Carol — of who she’d been, of what we’d had, of the grief that had no one to share it because the one person who’d have shared it was the person I was grieving.