What We Leave Behind

Margot stood at the kitchen sink, the water running cold over her hands as she washed the single coffee mug—the one Marcus always used, chipped at the rim where his lip had rested a thousand mornings. Her hair fell in gray-streaked hanks around her face, unwashed for three days, the mirror upstairs deliberately covered with a bath towel.

On the counter sat the bottle of vitamin D supplements Dr. Chen had prescribed, something about sunlight deficiency and grief hormones, as if capsules could fix the hollowed-out space where her husband used to breathe. She'd forgotten to take them. She forgot everything now.

"You need to get out, Margs," Jenna had said over the phone that morning, her oldest friend, the one who held boundaries like other people held grudges. "Come to dinner. Sarah and Rob are coming. It'll be good for you."

Margot had almost agreed, until she remembered their golden retriever, Buster—how he would nudge her hand with that wet, expectant nose, how he would look for Marcus in his favorite armchair, the one they'd already donated to Goodwill. She couldn't sit through that performance of normalcy. Not yet.

The water grew colder. She turned off the tap and watched the last droplets slide down the porcelain, realizing with sudden clarity that grief was not a wave that crashed and receded, but a tide—relentless, patient, reshaping the landscape of her days one grain at a time.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. Jenna again. Or maybe it was the pharmacy calling about her vitamin prescription. It didn't matter. She would answer eventually. She would wash her hair, take the pills, return the borrowed life she'd been living since the funeral. But not today.

Today, she would stand here with the quiet and let herself be precisely, devastatingly lonely.