CHAPTER
SIX
The night before my visit to the morgue, I’d dined with Trina. We’d sat apart, staring at unfinished salads, pushing the greasy leaves across our plates. As the minutes passed with small talk, broken by long silences, the reason for the meeting loomed larger between us. Finally, Trina stopped maneuvering the spinach on her plate and leaned forward.
“Tom, you know I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I said, struggling to conjure the emotion described by those words. Trina and I lived a modern life with a modern relationship: married without being married—a harried life, communal, cluttered, and intense, littered with unfulfilled intentions, with projects begun and left uncompleted. Yet for all that, we’d held each other in the dark, promising in whispers that we were happy, and
