The bed was cold on her side.
Dylan reached across the sheet without opening his eyes, the way he did every morning—fingers searching for the curve of her shoulder, the warmth of her back. Nothing. He opened his eyes. The pillow still held the shape of her head but the sheets were pulled back and the room was quiet.
He lay there for a moment, listening. Down the hall, nothing—no crying, no stirring from the boys' room. The clock on the nightstand read 5:47.
Three months. That was how long it had been since Lisa, and in those three months the mornings had become unreliable. Some days he woke to Catherine already up, sitting at the kitchen table in the half-dark with a cup of coffee she wasn't drinking. Other days she was still in bed at noon, the covers pulled over her head, and Annika would call the firm and he'd hand the desk to his second and come home and make grilled cheese for the boys, rock William on his chest, tell Bryan again that Mommy was tired. He'd wait for the bedroom door to open. By evening he'd be back at the firm.
Today she was up. That was something.
Two days ago he'd come home to find Annika giving the boys their bath. Catherine was in the living room, sitting on the couch, not reading, not watching anything. Just sitting with her hands in her lap. Bath time had always been hers. Since Bryan was born she'd done it—the warm water, the washcloths, the rubber toys lined up on the edge of the tub. It was her time with them the way the early mornings were his. He'd walk past the bathroom and hear her singing to them in Italian, the language she'd learned for the paintings. "You've Got a Friend in Me," since November — Bryan had seen Toy Story once and would have nothing else, and she'd had it in Italian by the second bath. Her voice low and off-key and happy, and Bryan would splash and she'd say hey, easy, mister and it was the sound of his family.
He'd stood in the living room doorway and said, "You okay?"
"I just needed Annika to do it tonight."
Her voice was flat. Steady. Wrong. He'd almost pushed. Almost sat down next to her and said, Talk to me. Tell me what's happening. But she'd turned on the television and the moment closed and he'd let it close.
That was two days ago. She hadn't done bath time since.
He swung his legs off the bed, pulled on sweatpants, and padded down the hall. The boys' room was dark, the nightlight casting a low orange glow across the carpet. Bryan was asleep on his stomach, legs splayed at angles that looked uncomfortable and weren't, the stuffed bear wedged under his cheek. Three years old and already a sprawler. Dylan crouched beside the crib. William was on his back, arms above his head, mouth slightly open, the small chest rising and falling.
He stood in the doorway and counted breaths. William in the crib. One. Two. Three. Then Bryan in his bed, the same. He'd been doing this since the hospital. Since they'd come home without Lisa and he'd stood over both of them for twenty minutes, terrified one of them would stop too.
The kitchen was empty. No coffee made. Catherine's coat was gone from the hook by the door. Her sneakers were gone.
A walk, he thought. Good.
Her therapist—the one she'd seen twice and refused to go back to—had suggested fresh air, routine, movement. Catherine had smiled politely in the way she smiled at everything now, a mask so convincing that only someone who knew her real smile could tell the difference. But he knew. He'd known her real smile since she was eighteen years old, leaning against a wall at a dorm party in Boston, mouthing along to whatever was playing, and he'd turned to his buddy and said, Who is that?
That smile had been gone since December.
He made coffee. Filled William's sippy cup with milk from the refrigerator. It had started a few weeks ago—Catherine couldn't nurse him to sleep, Annika had tried water, the crying was the kind Dylan couldn't undo. He'd stopped at the market on the way home from the firm and brought milk back, and now there was always milk in the fridge, and William drank it from the sippy cup like it was the thing he'd always done. He set the cup on the counter and got Bryan's cereal ready. Blue bowl, the one with the bear painted on the bottom that Bryan liked to uncover by eating everything above it.
This was his hour. Before the firm, before the phones started, before the trading floor noise and the portfolio reviews and the particular pressure of managing other people's money. Six a.m. in a kitchen with his boys was the only part of the day that still made sense.
William woke first. Not crying—the preliminary sounds, the low chatter from the crib, half-words and soft complaints he made to himself before he was fully awake, working himself up to an opinion about being up.
He went and got him. Lifted him out of the crib with both hands—William was heavier every week, solid in a way that still caught Dylan off guard—and William blinked against the hallway light and then did the thing that undid Dylan every single morning: he turned his face into Dylan's neck and let out a long, shuddering sigh, like the only thing he'd wanted in his whole small life was this.
Dylan closed his eyes and held him. Just stood in the hallway holding his son. William's fist closed around the collar of his t-shirt and his breathing steadied and for a moment neither of them moved.
Yesterday, Catherine had been standing in the kitchen when William started crying from his crib. She'd flinched. Not moved toward the sound, not gone to get him. Flinched. A full-body thing, like the cry had hit her somewhere physical. Dylan had said, "I'll get him, you're exhausted," and she'd nodded without looking at him and he'd gone down the hall and picked up his son and not thought about it again.
"Okay," Dylan whispered. "Okay, buddy. Let's go."
He carried him to the kitchen and sat at the table with William on his lap. Handed him the sippy cup. William took it in both hands and drank, and his eyes found Dylan's face over the rim. That look. Nearly two and William still watched him while he drank, this steady unblinking focus, like Dylan was the fixed point in the room. Dylan looked back. He always looked back.
Bryan appeared in the kitchen doorway trailing the bear by one ear. His hair was pressed flat on one side and standing straight up on the other. He had cereal-radar. You could run a vacuum cleaner past his door and he'd sleep through it, but the sound of a bowl on a countertop brought him out like a fire alarm.
"Morning, bud."
"Where's Mommy?"
Dylan looked up. Bryan didn't usually ask. The mornings were Dylan's. But Bryan was watching him now, focused, very still.
"Mommy went for a walk. She'll be back soon. You want cereal?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah what?"
"Yeah please." Bryan climbed into his chair, which was a production—one knee up, both hands on the seat, a full-body heave that ended with him sitting sideways and having to rotate. He'd been doing it himself for two weeks and Dylan had learned not to help. Helping was a declaration of war.
Dylan set the cereal in front of him and watched Bryan grip the spoon like a shovel. Milk ran down his chin and onto his pajama shirt. Dylan wiped it with his thumb and Bryan leaned into the touch for half a second—pressing toward his dad's hand—and then went back to the cereal.
"Daddy, is the bear at the bottom?"
"The bear's always at the bottom. You gotta eat your way down to him."
"What if he's not there?"
"He's always there, Bry. Every single time."
Bryan considered this with the gravity of a three-year-old assessing a cosmic promise, then attacked the cereal with renewed purpose. William had finished the milk and was leaning against Dylan's chest, one fist wrapped in the hem of his t-shirt, the other hand still holding the empty cup. Dylan leaned over and pressed his lips to the top of William's head. Shampoo and sleep. The smell of his boy who didn't know anything was wrong.
For a moment... just a moment... the kitchen was warm and full and the morning held together.
Annika came out of her room at six-thirty, already dressed, hair pulled back. She was twenty-six. Her competence made Dylan feel both grateful and guilty. She'd been with them since Bryan was two months old. After Lisa, she'd simply absorbed more without being asked—bath time, bedtime, the hours when Catherine couldn't.
"Morning, Mr. Brennan."
"Morning, Annika."
She took William from his lap with the ease of a woman who'd done it a thousand times. William went without protest, one hand still holding the empty cup. Bryan held up his spoon.
"I found the bear!"
"Did you now?" Annika said, and her voice was the one the boys turned toward, the one that meant the day had officially started. "Let me see."
Dylan stood. Kissed the top of Bryan's head. Touched William's cheek with the back of his finger. "I'll be home by seven," he said, which was a lie—it would be eight, maybe nine—but he said it every morning and Annika nodded every morning and neither of them acknowledged the fiction.
He walked down the hall to the master bedroom and into the ensuite. Flipped the light on. The countertop was white marble, her side and his side, a geography they'd established without ever discussing it. Her toothbrush. Her moisturizer. The small glass dish where she put her rings at night.
The rings were in the dish. He noticed that without understanding it.
He turned on the faucet, wet his face, spread the shaving cream. The mirror fogged slightly from the warm water. He drew the razor down the line of his jaw—once, twice—rinsed the blade, tilted his chin.
Then he saw it.
A page from a notepad, folded once, propped against the small clear bottle of perfume she'd worn since college. The ink showed through the paper. Her handwriting. He knew it before he touched it—the slant of her letters, the way she crossed her t's with a long horizontal stroke.
He set the razor down. Picked up the paper with wet fingers. Unfolded it.
I am sorry. I can't do this. The boys are better off without me.
He read it twice. His hands were steady the first time. They were not steady the second. He turned the note over. Blank. He turned it back. The same fourteen words. Nothing else. No explanation, no address, no I'll call. Just the quiet way her handwriting trailed off at the end, like she'd run out of what she could bear to say.
The bathroom got very small. The walls, the mirror, the marble counter with her things still on it—all of it pressed inward. He put one hand on the counter to hold himself up and he read it again, the same fourteen words, as though a fifteenth might appear that would make it mean something else.
The boys are better off without me.
Not I need space. Not I'm leaving you. Not I'll call when I'm ready.
Better off without me.
He turned and walked into the bedroom. Opened her closet. Gaps. Hangers pushed to one side, spaces where clothes had been. Not everything. Not most of it. But enough. A duffel bag was missing from the top shelf.
Clothes gone meant she was alive. That was the first thought and it was so ugly and so necessary that it buckled something in his chest.
He sat on the edge of the bed. The note was in his hand and the shaving cream was drying on his face and his wife was gone. Not for a walk. Just gone.
The flinch. William crying and Catherine flinching like the sound had cut her. Bath time. Annika doing bath time two nights running and Catherine sitting on the couch with her hands in her lap and her voice flat and steady and wrong and he'd said you okay? like that was enough. Like the question was the same as the answer.
He should have. He should have taken her hands out of her lap and held them and said, Tell me what's happening. Tell me what you need. But pushing meant hearing something he might not be able to fix. He fixed things. That was who he was. That was all he knew how to do.
He couldn't fix this.
His eyes burned. The handwriting blurred. He pressed the heels of both palms into his eyes and his breath came in short, jagged pulls and the sound that came out of him was not a sound he recognized. It came from somewhere below his ribs, from the place where he'd kept everything since Lisa—the grief and the terror and the four a.m. wakings and the pretending, the relentless pretending that he could hold this together, that he was holding this together.
He wasn't.
His daughter was dead and his wife was gone and he was sitting on a bed with shaving cream on his face and he could not breathe.
Down the hall, Bryan screamed.
Not in pain—bright, sharp, furious. Told no, or bear fallen, or wanting his mom. Annika's voice followed, steady, patient. William started to cry.
He was thirty years old. He was five years into a bet that Luthor Capital was going to be worth something. He had buried his daughter three months ago. His wife was gone. His sons were down the hall.
He wiped his face with the back of his hand. He folded the note along its original crease. And he stood up.