I was weeping for the husband I had invented and lived with for seven years, the kind and modest man who had never actually existed, who was dying that night in my chest as surely as I was meant to die in the morning.

I let him go, there in the dark, in silence, with my killer’s arm heavy across my hip.

And when the last of it had leaked into the pillow, I was empty, and steady, and ready.

Grief, it turns out, when you ration it right, does not weaken you.

Cried out in the correct ninety seconds, it clears the way.

Yes, I thought. It does.