Much later in the night, she senses the muffling of the house as the snow begins to fall, heavy and steady. She wakes once to the distant sound of the plow singing down Prentiss Street, and then goes back to sleep again.

In the early morning, in the strange gray half-light of the ongoing storm, she wakes again and gets up. The skylight in the bathroom is blank with snow and her face looks young in the gentle dusk the mirror offers. She goes downstairs. She feeds the cat. She makes her own coffee and sits at the big oval table drinking it, imagining Graham in this very spot, morning after morning, alone, as she slept on upstairs.

She remembers sitting here at the table the night John came over with his flowers, and her sudden conviction then, hearing his steps on the porch, that he was Graham, come back to her. She remembers too that after John left her alone that night, she had imagined how, in just that same way, she might wake up one day having dreamt Graham alive, and have to face her loss again. That this might happen over and over.

She watches the heavy flakes fall. They’ve bent the branches of the lilacs nearly to the ground, they’ve weighted the viburnum that Sarah and Lucas planted in memory of their father, they’ve covered the box shrubs that Karen disliked so much, they’ve made a circle of mysterious mounds out of the old chairs on the patio.

Looking out into this world, shrouded in the warm gray tones of an old photograph, full of the mystery of everything that’s there but has been made invisible, she wants to record it, to make it last. She thinks for a moment of going upstairs to get her camera.

And then it comes to her, really for the first time since her fall, that she won’t be able to take pictures, at least for a while.

That she will have to record all of this, remember it, on her own.

She feels it coming then, and she welcomes its return—the grief that seizes her.