No. Nothing.

Josh waited all day in a state of furious, silent martyrdom, hating himself, hating everyone else. Took the dog for a run. Spoke to no one. Checked his phone every ten minutes, then every five, then restarted it in case it had a glitch.

Still nothing.

He could, of course, reach out to someone. Ben would go for a walk with him; all he had to do was ask, and they’d be at the Botanical Center or driving to Boston. It would be better than this ridiculous, pointless anger. But this was a test. A test of them, a test of him.

Everyone failed.

By 8:37 p.m., he hated them all.

Fury was creeping into his head like a disease. A red-out was coming.

The first time it happened, he was six, and the school bully—Sam, who was bigger and stronger than any kid in class—had thrown Caitlin’s eyeglasses across the cafeteria. Caitlin was a special needs girl and Josh’s friend. Joshua didn’t remember anything about what happened until he was in the principal’s office with his mother, being told that he’d tackled Sam. Josh asked why there was blood on his shirt and why his eye was hurting; it was because Sam had punched him in the face. Josh had hit back, splitting Sam’s lip. Both boys had been suspended for a week, but Stephanie took him out for ice cream that afternoon, and when he came back to school, Caitlin handed him a card with her painstaking printing: Thanks for sticking up for me.

Another time, when he was ten, his mother had a violently bad reaction to a pepper and had to be rushed away in the ambulance with anaphylaxis. The Kims had come over, but Josh had been like a feral animal, they told him later. It had taken Ben and another neighbor to carry him in the house and hold him down until he came back into himself.

A few days later, after talking to his pediatrician, Josh’s mother told him these incidents weren’t uncommon for people with Asperger’s, as they called it then. The trick was handling it. Distracting himself. She’d given him a sentence to chant when he was little—The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. “It has every letter in the alphabet,” she said. “Think about it, Josh. Count the letters.” It had become a mantra when the red started to flare. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

At the same time, Ben had taught him to box, or at least, the different types of punches used in boxing. Josh never hit any human, but hitting the bag was . . . cathartic.

Now, at 8:42 p.m., he could see the red rising. Still time to head it off at the pass.

He went to the always empty gym on the first floor of their building and beat the shit out of a punching bag.

Barefisted. The smack of his fists against the hard leather, the exhale with the effort, the sting of the punch, the ache radiating up his arm weren’t enough. Harder. Harder. The hiss as he punched the bag turned into exhalations of ha! ha! Sweat poured off his body. The exhalations turned into words—No. No. No. No. Then, into curse words so foul and filthy he should’ve been ashamed. But he wasn’t. He was furious.

She shouldn’t have died. She should not have died, goddamnit, and the motherfucking idiotic way-behind-the-times motherfucking healthcare system fucked her over and left her for goddamn dead and had motherfucking nothing, nothing, nothing to offer her, the stupid sonofabitch asshole fucking shit, shit shit fuck.

His fury bounced off the walls, echoing, and his knuckles were bleeding now, his fists sliding as they landed on his own blood, and good, good, the pain felt better than the helpless oppressive nothingness.

Finally, staggering from exhaustion, sweat running down his bare torso, his hands looking like they’d been through a meat grinder, he staggered to grab a towel and mop himself up.

Creepy Charlotte, with her pale blue eyes that were too far apart, smiled at him from the doorway. “Want to grab a drink, Josh?”

“Jesus Christ, no,” he said. He got the disinfectant wipes and scoured the punching bag, distantly noting the burn on his knuckles.

“Another time, then.”

“No. Never.”

“See you soon.”

And people thought he was bad at reading signals.

The punching bag had done the trick. He was so tired, he had to take the elevator up the two floors to his apartment. He showered, the hot water stinging his hands. When he was done, he went into their room, closing the door so Pebbles wouldn’t come in and mess up the bed.

Last week, he’d awakened already knowing she was gone. He didn’t reach out for her. That in itself ripped his heart apart all over again. Two months and one week was all it took for his muscles and instinct to adjust. Reaching for her had been his habit in marriage; now, marriage was over, and his stupid body recognized that.

He had stopped checking her side of the bed in the middle of the night. Stopped wondering if she was already up. He didn’t call her name. He didn’t check his watch, wondering if it was time for her meds or a walk or some breathing exercises. He didn’t accidentally reach for two plates at dinnertime, whenever that was, and when he realized he didn’t, he deliberately set out two plates, because the acceptance of her absence was worse than the forgetting of her death.

She was dead. It was a fact now, and that was more awful than walking into a room and wondering where she was. He shouldn’t get used to this. It was grotesque to even consider.

And now, today. May first, the day he had proposed to her four years ago. He’d gotten down on one knee as the crab apple blossoms rained down gently all around them, and asked Lauren Rose Carlisle to be his wife.

He went to her bureau and opened her jewelry box, where he’d put her engagement and wedding rings at some point. He didn’t have a clear memory of that, but here they were. He’d give them to Octavia someday, he supposed. Or to Sebastian, for his future wife. Or he could throw them in the fucking ocean, at the beach on Cape Cod, where they’d had so many beautiful days and nights. Maybe he’d just walk into the ocean himself with the rings in one hand, his pockets loaded with rocks to weigh him down. Maybe a passing great white shark would eat him, and he could be dead, then, too.