What We Keep in Empty Rooms

Maria found the orange hat on her third pass through the apartment. It had belonged to David's mother, a woman Maria had never met, whose dementia had progressed in inverse proportion to the knitting skills she'd applied to this terrible, fluorescent thing. The cat, a rescued tabby named Louise, watched from the windowsill with what Maria imagined was judgment.

"It's been two months," David said from the doorway. His voice was careful, the way it had been since the miscarriage, since the silence between them had grown too large to fill with anything but caution. "You can throw it away."

Maria turned the hat over in her hands. The wool was scratchy against her palms. "Your mother made it."

"She didn't know who I was the last time I saw her. She thought I was her dead brother." He stepped into the room, closer than he'd stood in weeks. "Keep it if you want. Burn it if you want. Maria, I don't care about the hat. I care that you're in here every day, going through things like you're waiting for something to change."

They stood there as the light shifted across the floorboards. This was what she'd been afraid of — not the loss itself, but the way it had hollowed them out, left them moving around each other like strangers in a house they'd built together.

Later, she found herself at the sink, forcing a bag of spinach into the garbage disposal. It was one of those bags that had been in the crisper drawer since before everything happened, leaves turning into slime at the bottom. The disposal groaned. She pressed the reset button with the heel of her hand, tears coming finally, hot and ridiculous and long overdue.

David's arms came around her from behind. He buried his face in her hair, and she felt the vibration of his voice against her spine. "I'm still here. I'm not going anywhere."

The orange cat wound between their ankles, purring like a small, persistent motor. Maria turned in his arms and pressed her face to his shoulder, letting herself be held in the kitchen that smelled of decay and possibility, surrounded by things they couldn't throw away and things they couldn't keep, together in the way that mattered most.