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She wasted hours dwelling on memories of sex with him, recalling every sensation, every inch of his body, in lurid detail. For weeks, she could think only about the first time they made love—not the first time they'd had sex, which was a frenzied, wanton act of passion that had caused Sara to sneak out of her own house in shame the next morning—but the first time they had really held each other, had caressed and touched and cherished each other's bodies the way that lovers do.
He was gentle. He was tender. He always listened to her. He opened the door for her. He trusted her judgment. He built his life around her. He was always there when she needed him.
He used to be there.
After a few months, she remembered stupid things: a fight they had had over which way the toilet paper roll should go on the holder. A disagreement about the time they were supposed to meet at a restaurant. Their second anniversary, when he'd thought driving to Auburn to see a football game was a romantic weekend. A beach trip where she had gotten jealous over the attention a woman at the bar was giving him.
He knew how to fix the radio in the bathroom. He loved reading to her on long trips. He put up with her cat, who urinated in his shoe the first night he officially moved into her house. He was getting laugh lines around his eyes, and she used to kiss them and think about how wonderful it was to be growing older with this man.
And now, when she looked in the mirror and saw a new line on her own face, a new wrinkle, all she could think was that she was growing old without him.
Sara still wasn't sure how long she had grieved—or if, in fact, she had ever stopped at all. Her mother had always been the strong one, never stronger than when her daughters needed her. Tessa, Sara's sister, had sat with her for days, sometimes holding her, rocking Sara back and forth as if she were a child who needed soothing. Her father fixed things around the house. He took out the trash and walked the dogs and went to the post office to get her mail. Once, she found him sobbing in the kitchen, whispering, "My child . . . .My own child . . ." Not for Sara, but for Jeffrey, because he had been the son that her father never had.
"She's just come undone," her mother had whispered on the phone to her Aunt Bella. It was an old colloquialism, the sort of thing you didn't think people still said. The phrase fit Sara so completely that she had found herself surrendering to it, imaging her arms, her legs, detaching from her body. What did it matter? What did she need arms or legs or hands or feet for if she could not run to him, if she could not hold him and touch him anymore? Sara had never thought of herself as the type of woman who needed a man to complete her life, but somehow, Jeffrey had come to define her, so that without him, she felt untethered.
Who was she without him, then? Who was this woman who did not want to live without her husband, who just gave up? Maybe that was the real genesis of the grief she felt—not just that she had lost Jeffrey, but that she had lost her self.
Every day, Sara told herself she would stop taking the pills, stop trying to sleep away every painful minute that passed so slowly she was sure weeks had gone by when it was only hours. When she managed to stop taking the pills, she stopped eating. This wasn't a choice. Food tasted rotten in her mouth. Bile would rise in her throat no matter what her mother brought her. Sara stopped leaving the house, stopped taking care of herself. She wanted to stop existing, but she didn't know how to make it happen without compromising everything that she had once believed in.
Finally, her mother had come to her and begged, "Make up your mind. Either live or die, but don't force us to watch you waste away like this."
With a cold eye, Sara had considered her alternatives. Pills. Rope. A gun. A knife. None of them would bring back Jeffrey, and none of them would change what had happened.
More time passed, the clock ticking forward when she longed for it to go back. Sara was coming up on the year anniversary when she had realized that if she were gone, then her memories of Jeffrey would be gone, too. They had no children together. They had no lasting monument to their married life. There was just Sara, and the memories that were locked in Sara's mind.
And so she had had no choice but to pull herself back together, to turn back the process of coming undone. Slowly, a lesser shadow of Sara started to go through the motions. She was getting up in the morning, going for a run, working part-time, trying to live the life she had before, but without Jeffrey. She had valiantly tried to trudge through this semblance of her earlier life, but she simply couldn't do it. She couldn't be in the house where they had loved each other, the town where they had lived together. She couldn't even attend a typical Sunday dinner at her parents' because there would always be that empty chair beside her, that vacancy that would never be filled.
The job notice at Grady Hospital had been emailed to her by a fellow Emory grad who had no idea what had happened to Sara. He had sent it as a joke, as if to say, "Who would go back to this hellhole?" but Sara had called the hospital administrator the next day. She had interned at Grady in the ER. She knew the great, creaking beast that was the public health system. She knew that working in an emergency room took over your life, your soul. She had rented out her house, sold her pediatric practice, given away most of her furniture, and moved to Atlanta a month later.
And here she was. Two more years had passed and Sara was still stagnating. She didn't have many friends outside of work, but then she'd never been a social person. Her life had always revolved around her family. Her sister Tessa had always been her best friend, her mother her closest confidant. Jeffrey was the chief of police for Grant County. Sara was the coroner. They had worked together more often than not, and she wondered now if their relationship would have been as close if they had each gone their separate ways every day and only glimpsed one another over the dinner table.
Love, like water, always flowed down the path of least resistance.
Sara had grown up in a small town. The last time she had seriously dated, girls were not allowed to call boys on the telephone and boys were required to ask the girl's father for permission to date his daughter. Those practices were quaint now, almost laughable, but Sara found herself wishing for them. She didn't understand the nuances of adult dating, but she had forced herself to try, to see if that part of her had died with Jeffrey, too.
There had been two men since she moved to Atlanta, both fixed up through nurses at the hospital and both exhaustingly unremarkable. The first man had been handsome and smart and successful, but there was nothing else behind his perfect smile and good manners, and he hadn't called back after Sara had burst into tears the first time they'd kissed. The second man had been three months ago. The experience was a little better, or maybe she was fooling herself. She had slept with him once, but only after four glasses of wine. Sara had gritted her teeth the entire time as if the act was a test she was determined to pass. The man had broken it off with her the next day, which Sara had not realized until she checked her voicemail at home a week later.
If she had only one regret about her life with Jeffrey, it would be this one: Why hadn't she kissed him more? Like most married couples, they had developed a secret language of intimacy. A long kiss usually signaled the desire for sex, not simple affection. There were the odd pecks on the cheek and the quick smacks before they went to work, but nothing like when they had first started seeing each other—when passionate kisses were titillating and exotic gifts that didn't always lead to ripping off each other's clothes.
