Everything you touch is a small ambush.

Her reading glasses folded on the windowsill where she left them.

The grocery list on the refrigerator in her cramped, careful hand, three items she would now never buy.

Her cardigan over the back of a chair, still holding, faintly, the powdery smell of her.

I moved through it slowly, and Lonnie moved through it fast, and I understood even then that we were grieving in the only ways each of us knew how — me by lingering, him by fleeing.

But there was something in his hurry that afternoon that went past grief and into something more like nerves.