The first month had nearly broken her.
Not in the sharp, sudden way that grief broke a person — but in the slow, grinding way that exhaustion did, eroding a little more of her each day until Erin sometimes caught her own reflection in the bathroom mirror and didn't quite recognize the woman staring back.
Her hair was permanently piled into a knot on top of her head, held together by whatever elastic she'd found first. There were soft purple smudges beneath her eyes that no amount of cold water could chase away. Her shirts had little crescents of damp on the shoulders from where Lio had drooled while she burped him, and she had long since stopped noticing.
Jenna had been a saint. True to her word, she had moved in the very first night, claiming the lumpy little couch in the living room a
