Let her do it again. Let her come back and get right to work.

He looked around the apartment and was horrified at the mess. Lauren would hate it. She was—had been—a very tidy person, and she would hate seeing their place like this. He was forty-five minutes into cleaning before he realized he was cleaning up for her. In case she came home.

When people called, he said he was doing okay. Getting through it. Hanging in there. But he kept looking at the door, same as Pebbles did. The poor dog did not understand that her owner wasn’t coming back. Pebbles used to sleep with them, but Josh couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping in the bed he’d shared with his wife. Pebbles and he now slept in the guest room at the end of the hallway.

He didn’t want to work. He didn’t care what was happening in the world or nation. He powered off his computers and set an automatic response for emails, saying he was taking some time off after a death in the family.

Jen, Darius and the kids had come over the day after the funeral to return Pebbles. Little Sebastian had run around the apartment, opening doors, looking under the couch, in the cabinets. “Where’s Auntie?” he demanded. “Is she hiding? She’s not dead! She’s not! She’s hiding!” A screaming tantrum had followed. Josh knew exactly how he felt. Darius had left with both kids, apologizing.

Grieving together, Josh found, was worse than grieving alone. His own searing pain was shocking—physically agonizing, causing him to bend in two, his hands over his head as if warding off a blow.

But seeing Jen sobbing into a towel in the bathroom, or sniffing the sweater Lauren had worn so often, ripped his heart out and ground it up with shards of broken glass. The sight of Donna, his mother-in-law, stroking a picture of Lauren, her mouth trembling, suddenly looking twenty years older, gutted him. His own mom, her face swollen from crying, trying to hide her tears by scrubbing his counters. Ben, squeezing his shoulder, wordless, his eyes wet as he looked away from a photo of Lauren on her wedding day. Ben had served as best man that day.

Yeah. Solo was definitely the way to go. Without his family, or hers, it didn’t feel so real. Sitting alone on the couch with the dog in the evening, all the lights off, he and Pebbles could both pretend Lauren was just about to walk in the door.

It was exhausting. It was like swimming in hot black tar. He worried about Donna and Jen, already having suffered the loss of Dave, Lauren’s beloved father. He worried about his mother, who had worried that Josh would never find someone and had been so glad when he did, and now had a thirty-year-old son who was a widower. He worried that Pebbles would die of a broken heart. He worried that he would die, and there would be nothing, no Great Beyond, no afterlife, no reunion, and then he wondered if that would be a chance worth taking.

In a nutshell, life was ruined.

He’d jerk awake at night to check her, reaching for her side of the bed, worried about her breathing, then realize, nope, she was dead. He got up in the morning and put the kettle on for her tea. One night, he called down the hall for her before remembering. Sometimes he woke up and wondered if he’d dreamed their entire marriage.

Dead. The word sounded exactly like what it was. Hard. Flat. Ugly and cold.

Since her diagnosis, taking care of her had been his job. Oh, he’d finished one medical device design and sold it to Johnson & Johnson, but mostly, he’d been trying to save her. He’d read every scholarly article about IPF he could find. He spoke to doctors, foundations, patients and pharmaceutical researchers, and the desperate search for a better outcome had eaten up hours of his day.

Then there was her actual care. Cooking for her, doing the regular household chores, getting her prescriptions filled, taking her to the myriad doctor’s appointments, arguing with the insurance company. Taking walks with her, doing her respiratory therapy, monitoring her O2 sats. Getting her to the bathroom when the medication gave her such bad diarrhea, he had to hold her on the toilet because she’d been too weak to stay there on her own. The past six months, he’d helped her shower almost every day. He’d had to make sure she took her meds at the appointed times. Make sure she had enough oxygen. Make sure she was eating enough. Make sure she was sleeping enough, happy enough, entertained enough, loved enough.

He missed every second of it. He’d cut off his arm to go back to that time.

He was lost. Utterly and completely lost. The Josh who was Lauren’s husband no longer existed, and all that was left was . . . this.

Pebbles was the only reason he left the apartment. Sometimes, he was too tired to face the outside world, so he took her up to the roof and let her shit up there. He wasn’t too proud of that, watching his dog crap where he and Lauren had had so many nice evenings—her sitting near the edge, him solidly in the center, since he didn’t like heights—but he couldn’t guilt himself into doing more. The seagull who had watched him burn his funeral clothes seemed to hang out there, judging him. Too bad. It was winter and cold as hell. Or maybe it was spring. He didn’t know. It didn’t matter.

Her “living urn” came—the soil, the supplements, the seedling. He couldn’t remember ordering them, but he must have. She’d bookmarked the page on his laptop. Joshua stood there at the counter, looking at the kit, his wife’s ashes, and got to work.

Lauren had loved plants. She’d grown herbs and flowers in pots on the rooftop and had bought hanging baskets for their rented house on the Cape. Their apartment was filled with plants, which reminded him they probably needed watering. He glanced around. Nope. Too late. They all looked dead.

As he followed the instructions, mixing his wife with the additive and soil provided by the living urn company, he was almost cheerful. He could picture her coming in. “What are you doing, hon?”

“I’m planting your tree.”

“Oh! Cool! Make sure those roots aren’t too squished.”

“You got it, babe,” he said aloud. Pebbles lifted her head to look at him.

This plant would not die. If it did, he’d kill himself. In a sudden panic, he booted up his laptop and ordered a gauge that monitored the soil’s moisture, pH, sun exposure, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. He read about what kind of exposure dogwood trees favored. The best room in their apartment would be their bedroom.