The Unhinged Widower Seeking Death Online

Chapter 2: A Normal Morning

I was standing beside the kitchen island when Graham came in, holding my old blue mug.

He stopped.

The mug slipped from his hand and hit the floor. It broke into three clean pieces.

For a moment, neither of us moved. His eyes traveled from my face to my wet coat, then to the muddy marks my shoes had left on his floor.

"You're alive," he said.

His voice sounded ordinary. That was the first thing I noticed. Not disbelief, not anger, not joy. Just three words spoken with the same careful precision he used when checking a measurement.

"Yes."

He looked at the door behind me. "How long have you been here?"

"Since before you left."

He glanced at the refrigerator, where my note remained clipped beneath the weekly schedule. I wanted to take it down. I couldn't make my hands move.

"You broke in."

"I still had a key."

"You told the world you were dead."

"I didn't tell the world. I disappeared."

His mouth tightened. "That distinction must have made it easier."

It wasn't a question. I had no answer that could make it better.

The broken mug lay at his feet. He stepped around it and set his travel mug on the counter. His hands were steady.

I said, "Harborlight sent me an alert."

He gave a short, humorless laugh. "That app still works?"

"It said you might hurt yourself."

"Does it say that every time someone posts something honest?"

"Are you planning to?"

He opened the cupboard and took down a clean mug. "No."

"Your posts say you want to die."

"They do."

"Then what am I supposed to think?"

"That I'm telling the truth about how I feel."

He poured coffee. He hadn't asked if I wanted any. He hadn't asked why I had returned. I watched him stir in a spoonful of sugar, though he'd stopped taking sugar years ago.

"I thought I'd find you out of control," I said.

"You thought grief would make me easier to face?"

I looked down.

He took the mug and moved to the sink. "You came because an app told you to."

"I came because I saw what you wrote."

"You didn't come when I was standing on the pier, asking everyone who would listen if they'd seen your kayak. You didn't come when the search boats went out. You didn't come when I had to identify your jacket."

He paused, fingers curled around the mug.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't use that word like a key."

I had thought about this moment for months. In each version I made, Graham shouted. He threw something. He demanded to know how I could do it. I had planned to let him rage until he ran out of words.

He did not rage. He walked to the table and opened his laptop.

"I have a meeting in twenty minutes," he said. "You can stay here until the police arrive."

"The police?"

"You're a missing person who just came home."

"I didn't file an insurance claim."

"That doesn't make you less missing."

"I didn't ask you for money."

"No. You just let me bury an empty space."

The words landed harder than shouting would have.

He was right. The town had held a memorial service on the beach. Graham had stood at the front in the rain. I had watched from a motel room in another county and told myself that staying away was kinder than making him choose between hating me and forgiving me.

I had not considered that he might have to do both.

"Did you mean what you wrote?" I asked.

He logged in to his meeting. "I meant it when I wrote it."

"And now?"

"Now I have a meeting."

"Graham."

He lifted his eyes. "I'm not going to hurt myself today."

The word today stayed between us.

I took a step closer. "Then come with me to the counselor."

"The appointment I canceled?"

"Yes."

"I canceled because I didn't want to sit in a room and talk about the dead."

"I'm standing right here."

"You're standing here now. That doesn't change what happened."

I didn't know how to argue with that.

He opened his meeting. A grid of faces appeared on the screen. He turned the laptop slightly away from me, a gesture so familiar that it stung.

"Wait," he said before I could speak. "Did you come back to stay?"

"No."

His expression barely changed. "Then don't make promises you can't keep."

He joined the call. I stood in his kitchen beside the pieces of the mug I'd used for years, listening to him introduce himself as if nothing in the room had changed.