Long after Lucy had met Caleb – after he had learned her favourite colour (green), her favourite kind of tea (chamomile), and exactly how to make her grandmother’s stuffed bell peppers (grilled until soft and packed with lentils and rice and chunks of feta) – it occurred to Lucy that she had never fallen in love. Not with anyone, but more peculiarly, not even with Caleb, her roommate of four years and the best thing to come out of her sociology undergrad.

It was a Friday afternoon, also known as pre-weekend rush hour at the grocery store. It was a scrabble for the latest batch of Niagara-grown summer peaches, precariously stacked; a stone fruit Jenga tower. There was a prickly old lady, dressed in a limp blazer and toting what Lucy, having picked up a certain flavour of useless knowledge from a childhood of afternoons at her fashionable grandmother’s condo, knew to be a knockoff Louis Vuitton purse.

  The realization – of the lack of love, not the Louis Vuitton – dawned slowly, smoothly, naturally. A thought formed over time, invisible until it was a blistering statement waiting for Lucy’s prompt and vicious internal investigation.

The old lady cleared her throat. “Will you be taking that within the next hour?”

Lucy looked down, her hand an inch away from a carton of peaches. She was frozen in place, internal gears spinning out of control. Her brain buffered; she could have sworn there was a high-pitched whine coming from somewhere. If she had been a laptop, she would be hot to the touch, with a fan so loud that one might nervously joke that the computer was preparing for liftoff. It seemed only fair that peaches would – briefly – move down the list of priorities.

Lucy’s unfailing politeness kicked in, as always, right on time. “I’m so sorry about that,” she yelped brightly, snatching the peaches and tossing them into her basket. “I’ll just scootch out of your way.”

The old lady scowled, but, thankfully, said nothing else. Lucy spun on the spot, checking the list on her phone, trying to remember if she wanted cilantro while her eardrums pulsed with the steady, relentless thump of this is the part where you fall in love. She tried to remember if she had wilted cilantro in the fridge. Surely, she was about to have the grand revelation that she had seen in movies; this was the conclusion of the first act. This was supposed to be the moment when the girl realized that she was in love with her best friend, because of course she had to be. I love him, now what? Oh my god, they were roommates. Second act is Mr. Darcy’s hand flex, third act is John Cusack with a boombox. Done and dusted, and the credits roll.

  Lucy wandered around the grocery store, absentmindedly checking items off her list, reading labels without really seeing them (the three cartons of split pea soup that ended up in her basket would be a surprise for unpacking-groceries-Lucy). By the time she reached the self-checkout line, her self-interrogation had produced several confusing conclusions: Caleb was warmth, and a smile that always simmered near the surface. He had the most complicated coffee orders known to mankind, mostly because of their shocking inconsistency, and he was borderline obsessed with straightening the couch cushions; surely this was only what people who were in love with each other were supposed to notice?

But quite frankly, Lucy was swiftly realizing that she didn’t know what it felt like to be in love with someone, and deep down, in the place where she shoved the disappointing shit that she didn’t want to think about, she knew that the warmth she felt when she looked Caleb was not the all-consuming feeling that the poets were writing about. There was no boombox.

Two machines over, the old lady with the knockoff Louis Vuitton was cursing a box of crackers that wouldn’t scan. When they finally did, she placed them in a reusable canvas bag, then pulled the peaches out of her basket. Lucy paused, third carton of split pea soup in hand, weirdly drawn to the unusual sight – people of the woman’s generation tended to maintain a healthy separation between their grocery shopping experience and the self-checkout machines. Lucy knew that peach carton had a barcode printed on the cardboard, but she watched the woman look up peaches in the machine’s directory, exhaling loudly when the touch screen simply wasn’t in the mood to work. An old man stood next to her, eyes narrowed, making no movement to help. Lucy’s machine commanded that she take her receipt, and she jumped, snatching the piece of paper, crumpling it in her pocket and scurrying through the automatic doors.

By the time Lucy got home, the early-August humidity had crept into every pore, and she was half-ready to wring out her t-shirt and call it a day. By the time she had put away the groceries, showered, debated posting an Instagram photo with a cryptic caption, and opened (and subsequently closed) her notes app with the short-lived dream of discovering hitherto unknown notes app poetry talents, it was ten past five, and Caleb would be back at any moment.

     Lucy paced. She pushed the living room window open, desperate for some kind of air flow. Do I tell him I’m not in love with him? The floor creaked, and her head whipped toward the front door. That would be crazy. That would be like telling one of my co-workers that I’m not in love with them. The baseline is being not in love with someone. I think.  That was definitely the sound of a key in the lock. I’m going to be totally normal. I can be totally normal. The door opened, and Caleb came in. His face was pale, and the red t-shirt – the one that he always wore on the first day he started falling behind on laundry – was rumpled. He stopped when he saw Lucy, who was standing in the entryway, staring daggers, a maniacal smile plastered on her face.

Like he had practiced saying it so many times that the words lost all meaning:

“My uncle just died.”

Somehow, Lucy froze further, every muscle in her body grinding to a halt. It wasn’t shock that was rooting her to the ground – she had only met Caleb’s uncle Aaron once. It was the bone-deep ache that seeped through her body at the sight of Caleb’s face. His face was so blank that it seemed to suck the sunlight out of the room, settling a fine layer of dust at the corner of Lucy’s vision. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t think she could ever know what to say. But Caleb was standing right there, and he hadn’t closed the door, and his face was empty.

Lucy swallowed. “How?”

“They think it was a brain aneurysm. Tara said he was fine, and then he was dead.” Again, he sounded so studied, like he’d practiced delivering this in the least Caleb-ish manner possible. Like he had simply chosen to untether himself from what he was saying, just a voice, just the sound waves, just glorified noise. A pair of dogwalkers passed on the sidewalk below the window; one of them laughed, the sound briefly echoing through the apartment. Lucy could see the maple tree in front of their building swaying gently in the wind. She could see a sparrow hopping along one of its branches. She wondered if the sparrow had always been there. She wondered if it felt safe, sheltered from the wind and hidden above the cars horns and barking dogs and laughing humans.

Lucy’s face fell, and she shut the apartment door and grabbed Caleb’s hand. It was cold. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not.”

“Aaron is dead.” Caleb didn’t seem to register his own words. “He’s dead.” Lucy waited. She couldn’t see the sparrow anymore. “I want to call him and tell him that he’s dead.”

Caleb dropped her hand. He kicked his shoes off, dropped his backpack, moved to the kitchen, a man in a dream and a marionette on strings. He absentmindedly straightened the couch cushions. A throw pillow fell to the floor – Lucy’s mother bought a lot of throw pillows from Winners – but he didn’t notice.

Lucy tried to think of something to say, but it all sounded so trite, even mentally; everything felt like empty platitudes, like something someone else would say when they learned that their best friend had lost the most foundational person in his life.

“I accidentally bought a lot of split-pea soup,” she said. “I’m gonna make you a bowl. And, like, a cup of ice.”

Caleb nodded. “Thanks.” He nodded again. “I have to go home.”

  The first few days of September were long. The morning air cooled down enough that stepping outside wasn’t just bearable, it was downright refreshing, and while the sticky August heat still turned up in the afternoons, Lucy could take big gulps of pre-work air and let the semblance of relief wash over her.

The day after Aaron died, Caleb had stuffed his canvas duffel with a change of clothes, a toothbrush, and Lucy’s copy of Normal People, spent a month of rent on a plane ticket, and was on the next flight home to Saskatoon. Lucy went to work, answering phone calls and scheduling appointments at the physiotherapy clinic three blocks away.

She did not think about roommates or sparrows.

Her evenings were quiet. She sat on the couch trying to write something, mostly so that she could call herself a writer; she tried making chili in the slow cooker she had bought at Value Village; she checked out Normal People from the library because somehow Caleb taking her copy made it the only book she wanted to read. She went to her friend Monica’s birthday party, where she sat on a different couch and thought about all the things she hadn’t written this year and the fact that the slow cooker was fucking broken (six whole dollars at Value Village). Monica had just finished her PhD in comparative literature and was celebrating turning twenty-seven and securing a literary agent and getting a fellowship to go write some book about Central American literary fiction, and her accomplishments made Lucy glow with pride and want to scream hey that’s my friend (!) while simultaneously feeling like a teeny-tiny ant that could and would be silently stomped to a teeny-tiny ant mush by an indifferent pedestrian. She wondered whether her ant children would care that she never returned with a breadcrumb for the family.

Lucy went to the grocery store. She booked a dentist appointment. She called Caleb once, and he sounded so tired that she figured it was better to wait until he called her. She starting using her childhood trick to fall asleep at night – she would concentrate hard, trying to isolate some kind of white noise in the apartment. Then, she would count to thirty, in Spanish, and then she’d start over, slowing the numbers down, relishing the slow descent into sleep. It always worked, except when it didn’t.

Two weeks after Caleb had gone and three days since he had last texted her, Lucy was walking home from the convenience store around the corner. She had a litre of milk and a scratch ticket, and she was mostly thinking about how she had somehow turned into her parents. Ahead of her, an old woman was struggling with her shopping caddy; it kept jerking to the side and getting caught in the strip of grass by the sidewalk. Lucy could see where the left wheel was jammed, and she didn’t want to get involved. She wanted to march home, slap on her noise cancelling headphones, and take comfort in the fact that surely it had all worked out and the old woman eventually got home safe.

“It’s the wheel,” Lucy said, jogging forward. “Lemme get it.”

“No, it’s a stupid contraption,” the woman said, twisting it out of the way. “My husband’s too stubborn to get a new one.”

She looked familiar. Knockoff Louis Vuitton. No peaches this time.

“Can I just try?” Lucy asked, surprised.

An exasperated exhale was the only reply, so Lucy wrenched the wheel into place, gave it an experimental push, and while the caddy still stuttered, it rolled in a straight-ish line. The woman nodded, once. She trundled off and Lucy watched, letting the woman get ahead. The buildings shrank away as the caddy crackled past. Lucy blinked, hard, imagining her eyelashes filtering away oddly sharp debris. Weird, she thought.

Her phone buzzed with a text – it was Monica, thanking her for picking up extra tajin for the birthday party’s spicy margaritas. The text was classic Monica, perfectly dishevelled in a slightly demented way but simultaneously following strict formatting rules that only Monica fully understood: thank u for the tajin & thank you for hanging out with me on my day of birth. i owe you one. love you, proud of you, send Caleb some good vibes, okay?

Louis Vuitton Peach Lady had turned the corner, but Lucy thought she could still hear the shopping caddy clattering away. The lady’s husband probably owed her a new one. Lucy would’ve gotten Caleb – or any roommate – a new one, if he’d needed it, and she couldn’t help but wonder why there was less expectation when you were married. Lucy texted Caleb Monica’s good vibes, then thought about calling him, but remembered just in time that she had decided to wait until he called her. She had spent nearly two weeks compulsively reading Aaron’s obituary, and she didn’t want Caleb to know that. Instead, she looked up the weather in Saskatoon. High of twenty degrees. A mix of sun and cloud.

He flew back near the end of September. He was himself, but he also wasn’t, and they went back to being Caleb and Lucy, but a Caleb and Lucy who left most things unsaid. For Lucy, it was because she never knew what to say anymore; her notes app was empty, and her evenings were so much quieter than they used to be. One night, overwhelmed by a grief that was not her own, Lucy dropped down onto the couch next to Caleb, hoping that proximity would help her remember how to talk to this person. This person who she loved, but who she wasn’t in love with, and somehow, she felt guilty about that, but she mostly felt guilty for feeling guilty, because Aaron was dead.

“Are you okay?” she asked eventually.

Caleb nodded. “Are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, you’ve been weird lately. Since I got back.”

The smallest tendril of panic licked through Lucy’s sternum. “You find?”

Caleb shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe it’s been me.” He stood up, sharply. “Shit’s been so weird lately. I don’t really remember what used to feel normal.”

Honestly, Lucy didn’t really remember how things had felt before either. Intellectually, she knew that silence used to feel comfortable and not oppressive. When they’d started living together, a year after graduating university and three years after meeting in a sociology seminar, it had seemed like fate. They had both needed a roommate, they had both wanted to live downtown, they both liked tidiness and privacy but nonetheless having someone on hand who was excited to try the other’s cooking – in short, neither one of them could imagine a better living situation.

Lucy watched Caleb start to pace, back and forth, the length of the coffee table, scrolling through something on his phone that she could tell he wasn’t reading.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said, relinquishing the entirety of the couch back to Caleb and his solitary void. “I’m gonna make some dinner. Something with fusilli. I don’t know.”

“Cool.”

Lucy knew herself, and she trusted herself, and she liked herself. Simultaneously, she was all-too aware of having no idea what to do, and sometimes, the easiest way to solve a problem is to remove a variable: so, later that night, when Caleb asked her if she liked Lady Bird, Lucy said that she did and left it at that. She didn’t tell him that the scene where Saoirse Ronan was on the phone had made her cry until her ribs felt raw, and she didn’t tell him that she’d stayed up until two in the morning watching fan edits of the movie, usually soundtracked by Chappell Roan’s California played at a searingly loud volume.

He nodded. He didn’t say anything else. So, Lucy smiled, and blinked away what she swore was dust in her eyes, and went back to reorganizing the endless boxes of opened pasta in the cupboard next to the fridge (four of them were fusilli), and tried her hardest not to think about the conversation that she and Caleb would have had if he had asked her the same question two months ago. Because honestly, she hadn’t been prepared for the grief of saying, “I love you, but this is a part of me that you don’t get to have anymore,” and not even understanding why.

He was alive and now he’s not. I’m not in love. I don’t know what to say.

A couple of days later, Lucy finally learned where Louis Vuitton Peach Lady and her presumably unburdened-with-a-personality husband lived: in the apartment complex right across the street. This was an accidental discovery. Lucy found an austere white envelope mixed in with some junk mail in her and Caleb’s mailbox, addressed to the apartment across the street, for a Mrs. Lucinda Bennett. Inconvenienced but mildly intrigued by the adventure, she eventually went over to put it in the correct mailbox, slightly self-conscious about standing in the building’s reliably musty entryway. The walls were beige; the carpet was meant-to-be-tasteful-but-ultimately-unfortunately-swampy green. There was an apartment bulletin board above the mailboxes. Someone was looking for a cat sitter. Someone else was selling their skis – Lucy briefly contemplated whether this was a sign that it was time for her to become a skier. 

“That’s my mailbox.”

Lucy’s skeleton practically ejected out of her body as she barely managed to swallow a shriek. Louis Vuitton Peach Lady stood behind her in the entryway, eyebrow raised. Lucy cleared her throat, willing her bones to return to their designated areas. “You’re Lucinda Bennett?”

The woman nodded, lips pursed.

Lucy stuck out the envelope. “We keep meeting!”

“What?”

Okay, unexpected. “Uh, your wheel?” Mrs. Lucinda Bennett was not showing a hint of recognition. Lucy decided it was best to jump ship. “This got accidentally delivered to my house. So, uh, here you go.”

Lucinda took the card. “Thank you.”

Her wedding ring reminded Lucy of the one her grandmother had worn. It was nice enough, but bulky and ornately carved. As a kid, Lucy had always thought that her grandmother’s ring looked like a miniature Christmas tree ornament – it would have been suited to being perched on the head of a glittery dove. Canadian Tire Christmas ornament core.

Lucy nodded. She had a sticky, creeping feeling in her shoulders: Lucinda did not much care for her. “I’m Lucy. Not Lucinda, just Lucy.” Silence. “I live across the street.”

“I see.”

Lucinda was clearly waiting for her to leave. Normally, Lucy would have been all too happy to follow this neon sign of a social cue, but something about Lucinda made her anxious; not anxious in a way that left her itching to flee the scene, but more so a feeling that made her want to unpick a figurative knot (or organize all the pasta boxes in her apartment). “Have you lived here long?”

Lucinda’s tone was terse. “A while.”

“I just ask because my roommate and I have lived across the street for four years – so I’m surprised we haven’t seen each other around more.”

“I can’t say that I spend much time studying the neighbours.”

“Do you live alone?” Lucy knew the answer, but still, she was curious.

Lucinda sighed. “With my husband.”

It was a losing battle; it was time to follow the neon sign. Lucy gave it one last push, her receptionist voice in full force. “Well, if you ever need anything, I’m just across the road. And my roommate, Caleb, is great. So... you know. Yeah. Apartment C.”

Silence.

Lucy left Lucinda in the entryway, unnerved by her own unease.

It seemed that no one else in all of human history had ever crowdsourced the internet’s opinion as to whether they should be mildly panicked that they weren’t in love with their objectively hot roommate, so that was a dead end. One Sunday afternoon, glued to her phone and deep in decision paralysis over whether she should try and do her laundry, sit down and actually write, or meal prep some taco bowls, Lucy typed worried that i’m subconsciously making my roommate’s grief about me into the browser’s search bar, but, blessedly, was too embarrassed to hit enter.

By the time October rolled in, all fog and wet leaves and sweet rot, Lucy had reached the point of fuck it, so she texted Monica. I’m not in love with Caleb and I feel like I should be and also I feel insane. It took Monica a day and a half to respond because the service in rural Nicaragua – a writing retreat paid for by the fellowship – was spotty on a good day. When she finally did, the three bubbles typed for a long time. Then: i don’t think he’s in love with you either. but u could ask, i guess???

Lucy didn’t ask, but she did take comfort in Monica’s assessment, mostly because Monica hadn’t echoed Lucy’s own thoughts and diagnosed Lucy as quite probably insane, and even that small relief was welcome.

It was the ninth of November.

In future years, it coalesced into one of those dates that stuck with Lucy, the same way she remembered getting her wisdom teeth out on the 22nd of March, or that her grade eight class trip to Ottawa had left on May 16th.

It was late afternoon on a Saturday; it was one of those stormy, damp, steely grey skies – midday had been dark enough that all the apartment lights were already on. Appreciating days like this, in all their quiet drama, was something Lucy had learned from Caleb, who was an indoor cat if there ever was one.

Somehow, in the last few weeks, she and Caleb had eased back into their old rhythms – yet another example of time sanding down rough edges. There was a separation between them now, one that Lucy suspected he felt differently about than she did, but it wasn’t wide enough to be insurmountable – and it wasn’t some unspoken corrosive secret. Actually, as the weeks went by, Lucy wondered if the separation had always been there, if it was in fact as simple as the truth of being different people.

Growing up, Lucy’s family had lived a ten-minute walk from the hospital. She had grown used to hearing sirens at all hours of the day and night, but not since living here, so a part of her noticed this one coming from a long way off, probably because a siren is the kind of sound you only seem to hear when it’s getting progressively closer to your house. Lucy peered out the living room window to see the ambulance turning the corner and pulling into the parking lot of Lucinda Bennett’s building. Despite the leaves having fallen off a few weeks prior, the maple tree – the sparrow’s maple – blocked Lucy’s view of the building’s front door. She saw two paramedics exit the ambulance, moving with a lot of purpose, though they weren’t running, not precisely. She saw someone open the door of apartment building’s entryway, though she couldn’t see who, and then she couldn’t see anything.

While Lucy had been watching the ambulance, fists clenched at her sides, the sky had split open, a sliver of blue between two walls of steel grey.

And then, a rainbow. It was shining through tangles of tree branches and next door’s fire escape and the towering gas station sign at the end of the road. Vividly, defiantly, ferociously. As Lucy watched, the storm clouds deepened, and a second, much fainter rainbow shimmered into being. An echo of the first. Across the street, the ambulance lights – still on, for some reason – flickered, reds and blues reflected into the puddled water on the road. Lucy felt her attention split, white light through a prism, not wanting to miss a moment of the perfectly ephemeral rainbow, wanting to know if the ambulance was for Lucinda Bennett. Wanting to know if she was alive. Wanting her to look out the window and see the double rainbow, such an impressive cliché. Lucy’s head went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, a spectator at the world’s loosest definition of a tennis match. Lucy looked, and she hoped, and she noticed.

Her heartbeat quickened. Her hands tingled. Behind her, she heard Caleb get up from the couch, meeting her at the window.

“Hell of a view.”

Say something. Just say something. “Have you ever met the old woman who lives in that place?” Lucy asked.

Caleb shook his head. “No. Have you?”

“A couple of times, yeah. She’s a character.” The paramedics were still inside the building; Lucy didn’t know if that was a good or a bad sign. “Do you think she’s dead?”

He didn’t answer.

Lucy swallowed. “I mean, I guess a lot of people live there. They’re probably not there for her.”

By the time the paramedics left, it was dark outside, so Lucy still had no way of figuring out whether the ambulance had been there for Lucinda or her husband or someone else entirely. The paramedics hadn’t raced off to the hospital either, which Lucy took to mean either the best- or worst-case scenario.

This was the problem with not knowing your neighbours. Lucy had no one to confer with – no one whose window view wasn’t blocked by a stately maple tree, and as she refused to be one of those people who stood on the sidewalk to ogle other people’s tragedies, or embarrassments, she resigned herself to a night of interchanging curiosity and dread. Sunday didn’t bring any answers, and neither did Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday. Lucy wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Maybe for Lucinda Bennett to come marching out of the building, janky caddy in hand and scowl affixed.

It wasn’t like Lucy spent every waking moment at the window. She had a job that needed her to organize the clinic calendar and book client appointments. She had a stack of library books to return, and a coffee date with a friend from undergrad. As of that Saturday morning, Caleb had started gaming again, which Lucy was more than ready to take as a promising sign, so she spent a good chunk of her evenings watching him replay Hollow Knight in preparation for the sequel, which they had mutually agreed she would buy him for Christmas. When they’d first moved in together, he had offered to play in his room, but she didn’t mind it in the living room, explaining that she had always liked being peripherally aware of as many worlds as possible.

On Tuesday, she called her dad, tempted to tell him about Lucinda Bennett, unsure if the story was interesting to anyone but her. Ultimately, she spent the conversation hearing about her aunt’s upcoming cataract surgery. He passed the phone to Lucy’s mother, who asked if she was still working at the clinic (yes) and if Monica had liked Nicaragua (yes).

When she wasn’t doing any of those things, Lucy was perched at the window, staring through the maple tree, willing Lucinda to life.

On Thursday, Lucy googled Lucinda Bennett and the first result was an obituary. The funeral home had uploaded it that morning. There was just one picture. It was hard to tell where it had been taken, the background a bit too overexposed. Lucinda’s smile didn’t meet her eyes.

She had been born in 1946; she was survived by her husband, John, her daughter, Brittany, and her younger sister, Janet. There would be no funeral service. In lieu of flowers, donations could be made to the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation; Lucy donated $100, then slammed her laptop shut.

Eventually, she floated into the living room, magnetically drawn to her window-side perch, even though there wasn’t much point to sitting there – it was dark out, so she couldn’t see a thing and anyone passing by on the street could see her. Caleb wasn’t home yet. The floors creaked. The fridge was humming. Lucy was vaguely aware of a dull pressure mounting behind one of her eyes. She was very aware of the loose skin around her thumbnail, and it burned when she picked at it.

She wasn’t sure how long she sat there. At some point, she realized that she had been counting in Spanish to the drone of the fridge.

That was definitely the sound of Caleb’s key in the lock. The door opened. Caleb already had his toque in hand, hair askew, backpack hanging off one shoulder. The writer in Lucy could see the parallels, but it didn’t much feel like that day in August. The floors were too cold, and anyway, she had barely known Lucinda. Lucinda certainly hadn’t known her.

Caleb paused, mid-kicking off his shoes. “What’s wrong?”

“You know I love you, right?” Lucy said.

He nodded. “Love you too.” He was washing his hands at the kitchen sink when he spoke again. “You dying, Luce?”

He was joking, but there was a nervous edge. “It was her,” Lucy said. “The old woman in the apartment. She died.”

Caleb looked up. “Shit, that sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know?”

Suddenly, Lucy noticed that it had gotten dark outside. She stood, zipped up her fleece, slid the blinds down. “I looked her up. Found her obituary. It was... to the point.”

The space between Caleb’s eyebrows scrunched together. “Like, too to the point?”

Lucy shrugged. “I dunno. Just weird, to see her life summarized like that. Like, with Aaron’s, it seemed like there was a sense of who he really was. Outside of when he was born and who he knew.”

Caleb had a strange look on his face. A small, taken-aback smile. “You read Aaron’s obituary?”

“Yeah. Quite a few times, actually.” Lucy wasn’t sure what to do with her hands, so she started unloading the dishwasher, at first briskly, and then less briskly when she realized that it was filled with dirty dishes.

As Lucy picked the dirty spoons back out of the drawer, Caleb spoke. “I wrote his obituary.”

This morning’s dishes went in. “I figured. I could hear you. In it.”

Caleb snorted. “You’re the fourth person to tell me that.”

Lucy laughed. The knot loosened with a kind of love that noticed. The kind that co-existed with, but didn’t cause the horrible silence. The kind that would replace broken shopping caddies. Caleb tossed her a box of teabags. “Chamomile,” he said. “They were on sale.”

That night, curled up under the quilt her grandmother had given her for her twentieth birthday, with the quiet sounds of Hollow Knight filtering in from the living room and the November wind rattling the windowpanes, Lucy was not thinking about Lucinda or panicking about a lack of love. Instead, she was imagining the old white tabletop fan that had been in her childhood bedroom. It was still there when she went home to visit, having been bought for a loonie at a yard sale and turning out to be mechanically immortal. The sound of that fan, breaking up the sticky air in the summer, letting ten-year-old Lucy sleep instead of just sweat, was burned into her brain.

She started counting, but didn’t even get to twenty before she fell asleep.