The blue blanket my mother knitted the year our son was born had survived three house moves and thirty-one years of marriage without so much as a loose stitch. Then, one Tuesday, my husband told me he’d donated it by mistake — even though we hadn’t given away a single box in months. Three nights later, I woke to the sound of the back door clicking shut, and to his voice drifting up the stairs, soft as a lullaby: “Daddy loves you too.”
PART ONE: The Empty Side of the Bed
At 2:04 in the morning, I sat up so fast the room tilted. Greg’s side of the bed was cold. His pillow was gone, and so, I would realize later, was a piece of him I hadn’t known was missing.
This had been going on for three weeks by then. Every night around midnight, the mattress would dip as he eased himself up, and every morning I’d find him in the guest room, insisting the firmer mattress down there was kinder to his back. I believed him, at first. Greg was fifty-six. We had been together long enough to watch our bodies start creaking in places that used to move without complaint, and a bad back seemed like exactly the sort of unglamorous truth a marriage settles into after three decades.
