The days after were ordinary.
This was the thing nobody told you about loss — not the dramatic kind, not the sudden kind, but the slow kind, the kind that had been arriving in increments for weeks so that by the time it fully arrived you had already been grieving it in pieces and the whole of it was somehow both worse and more manageable than the sum of its parts.
The days were ordinary.
I went to the bakery. Both locations. The morning rush and the wholesale orders and Maya's quiet competence at the West Village counter and Renee's spreadsheets and Dorothy in her corner with her k****e. The cardamom tart in the front of the case, center position. The lavender tart selling out by noon on most days.
The ordinary machinery of a life that was mine and had always been mine and did not requ
