She had been complaining of heartburn for a week.

She had gone to bed early.

At four in the morning she had sat up, said her husband’s name once in a completely ordinary voice, and that was the entire warning the world gave him.

Lorelai was five.

Gemma was two and a half and would grow up with no real memory of her mother, only a set of borrowed images — the framed photograph on the stairs, the video from Lorelai’s fourth birthday where a woman with dark curly hair laughs at something off camera and reaches out to fix a party hat.

Chadworth did what a certain kind of man does when the ground opens.