Not once.

Chapter 7 — The Things They Left

The house was full of them, and I could not make myself change it.

Jonathan’s coffee cup stayed on the edge of the kitchen counter for months, exactly where he had left it that last morning, a faint ring dried in the bottom.

I could not wash it.

To wash it felt like washing him away, like erasing the last ordinary trace of an ordinary morning, and so it sat there, and I looked at it a hundred times a day, and left it.

Samuel’s blue school jacket stayed on its hook beside the front door, at the height where a seven-year-old hangs a jacket, and every time I passed it my hand wanted to reach out and straighten it the way I always had.