rest stop and found him gone. The question she had asked in the early years out loud, to anyone who would listen, and then to herself in the darker part of the night, and then only rarely, only in the moments when she let herself go back to that rest stop and stand in the middle of it and feel the full weight of the absence.
“Did you think I stopped looking?”
He looked at the bottle.
The kitchen was very quiet.
“No,” he said.
She started crying again. Not the desperate kind from the shoulder of Route 9, but something quieter and more sustained.
“I think part of me knew that,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain it exactly. But I think that knowing was part of what kept me going.”
That undid her more completely than anything else had.
More than the Polaroid. More than the
