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“It’s fine,” I muttered, wiping my coat sleeve beneath my nose.

“Why the hell didn’t you hit him back, man?”

I shrugged. “What’s the point? ”

“Uh, the point is, the asshole fucking assaulted you, and you stood there and took it.”

“He lost her too, Sid. He’s allowed to be pissed.”

He gawked at me. “And that gives him the right to break your fucking nose?”

I groaned and rolled my eyes. “My nose isn’t broken.”

“Oh, so that makes it okay for him to beat your face in. Sure, I gotcha.”

“Can we get out of here?” I pulled out my cell phone to check the time. “I have shit to do today. Laundry. Cleaning. Gotta go back to work tomorrow—"

“ Work ?”

I looked at him like he’d sprouted two extra heads. “Yeah. Work. You know, that thing I do to make money?”

Sid looked off in the direction of the gravesite, where some stragglers still lingered. He looked helpless and confused as he blinked and opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, multiple times, before finally saying, “Max, you just …”

“I just what?”

He lifted a hand and gestured out toward the small gathering of mourners. Maybe I should’ve been one of them. Maybe that would’ve been more socially acceptable, more normal. But what the fuck was normal anyway?

“You just buried your wife and baby, man,” he said, his voice strangled, like he might cry. “They’re … they’re not even in the ground yet, and you’re talking about work. It’s okay if you want to— "

“Take some time?” I asked, and he nodded. “You know what that looks like for me? That looks like hours and hours of being stuck in here.” I tapped my temple. “Hours and days and years of beating myself up over and over and over again, doing way more damage than weak-ass Brett could ever do to me.”

He lowered his gaze to the frozen ground and nodded. “I know it feels like that now, but—"

“Don’t tell me it’ll get better, okay? Don’t do that.

I’m alone, Sidney. I have nobody, I have nothing.

And before you go and tell me that I have you, I have Ricky, I have Grace and Lucy …

I know. I fucking know . But at the end of the day, at the end of all of this shit—fucking life and whatever—I’m alone .

So, whether I go to work today or tomorrow or three fucking weeks from now, it’s not going to make a fucking difference.

I’m alone . I’d just rather get paid in the meantime. ”

He looked helpless, like he wanted to help me in some way, to save me, but there was no more salvation left for me. Maybe he understood that now—I didn’t know—but he nodded and muttered, “Yeah, um … let me find Grace, and we’ll get out of here.”

***

I did go to work that night and every night for several weeks.

I went about life on autopilot. Eating when I had to eat.

Sleeping when I had to sleep. Showering, cleaning, driving to work and back.

I kept my mind on everything but what I’d lost. I read the books Laura and I had already read, and I filled crossword puzzle books.

I pretended everything was fine, normal even, until the one-month anniversary of Laura’s death.

And then, as if a cloth had been lifted from off my eyes, I could hardly function.

Couldn’t crawl out of bed. Couldn’t stomach food. Couldn’t bring myself to do anything but hold on to her pillow and clothes and cry because I knew—I knew —that scent couldn’t hold on forever. It would fade. It would disappear. Another piece of evidence that she had once existed, but was now gone.

From the bedroom window, I could see the lighthouse, blinking and beckoning. I thought about the bridge. I thought about the rocks and their jagged edges. I could fall now, crack my skull, and go the same way she had. They’d say it was poetic, tragic. A terrible ending to a terrible love story.

Why couldn’t she have just stayed? Why couldn’t we have lasted forever?

“You’re always just passing through,” I remembered her saying long ago, and I thought, So were you, babe .

“How am I supposed to do this?” I asked that beacon of light as it appeared, then disappeared again. “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

The doorbell rang, and I pinched my eyes shut. It was probably the mailman or something. I reminded myself to breathe and then …

Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong!

“Fucking hell,” I growled angrily, rolling out of bed, every bone in my body screaming in agony. Wanting to give up. Wanting to die .

In nothing but my underwear, I stomped angrily through the house toward the door, and without checking to see who it was, I threw it open to find Sid with a bag of something in hand.

He looked down at my nearly naked form. “Getting soft there, Sergeant.”

“The fuck are you talking about?”

He poked my abs. “Maybe you should drop and give me thirty sit-ups.”

“Why the hell are you here?”

“Because I know what day it is,” he said and pushed past me into the house. “Wow.”

I closed the door begrudgingly. “What?”

“Are you, like, swearing off electricity completely?”

“Turn on a light if you want it on,” I grumbled, kicking a Barbie to the side on my way to the couch.

Then an ache pinched in my chest at the thought of treating something of theirs with such disregard, and I bent over to pick up the doll and slowly crossed the room to lay it gently on the pile of their other toys.

I brushed its hair from its eyes, the way I’d once done to them so many times before.

Fucking hell, if this pain in my chest could just let up for once …

I felt Sid’s eyes on me, felt him watching my every move, and when I finally tore my gaze from the doll to sit on the couch, every part of my body in pain from simply putting in an effort to live, I asked, “What do you want, Sid?”

“I wanna make sure you’re not killing yourself over here,” he replied, flipping on a light .

I squinted at the assault to my eyes. “No,” I quietly murmured. “Not yet anyway.”

“What was that?”

I shook my head, lifting a dismissive hand. “Nothing.”

He dropped the bag on the coffee table in front of me. “Eat something. And don’t say shit like that to me again.”

“I’m not gonna kill myself,” I said, reaching out and opening the bag.

“No? Good. I’m glad to hear it.” He plopped onto the couch beside me and crossed his arms. “But I’m serious. Don’t ever say shit like that to me again.”

I pulled out a Styrofoam box and popped it open to find an assortment of tacos. The next box had a pile of loaded nachos. Sid reached in and pulled out two bottles of Coke.

“How did you know I wouldn’t be at work?” I asked, piling meat and cheese and sour cream onto a chip and hauling it to my mouth.

Ha. The moment I wasn’t alone, I’d suddenly found my appetite.

“Just had a hunch,” he said, grabbing a taco and taking a bite. “I thought about bringing Grace and Liam, but then I decided I wanted you all to myself.”

I sniffed a chuckle and grabbed another chip.

“You know, Laura always hated when I ate in the living room.” I shoveled more beef and cheese into my mouth and reached into the bag to find a napkin to wipe my greasy fingers on.

“She’d come home from work sometimes and find me in here with the girls, eating cookies or chips or something, and she would get so pissed off. ”

Sid gave me his attention, never turning away for anything, but he didn’t say a word. Not a damn thing. He just let me talk, saying whatever I wanted—no, needed —to say.

“And I …” I sighed, tossing the napkin onto the coffee table before leaning back on the couch.

“I never listened. I never took her seriously about it. I always looked at it like, it’s a living room.

It should be lived in, right? And I mean, sure, I understand you don’t want to constantly vacuum the floor or clean up crumbs, but you pick your battles, right?

You … you don’t sweat the small stuff because if you do, the big stuff feels completely fucking catastrophic.

I’d say to her, ‘Babe, if you get all bent out of shape over crumbs , what the hell are you going to do when something really serious happens?’”

Sid hung his head and nodded.

“But”—I cleared my throat and emptied my lungs—“it wasn’t about that.

It was about hearing her. It was about respecting her feelings and her time.

I’d never vacuum after the girls and I ate in here.

I’d just”—I gestured toward the floor—“leave a mess and go off to work, always expecting her to clean it up because she always did.”

He sniffed loudly and dropped his taco back into the box before scrubbing his palm over his bearded chin.

“I should’ve cleaned up more,” I said, nodding to myself. “I should’ve … spent more time listening to her. She hated the sunrises, man, but every morning, she’d wa ke up to watch them with me because she listened to me. But I never—"

“Don’t go there, dude,” he said, finally breaking his silence. “You guys loved each other. You were a good husband. Maybe not perfect, but who the fuck is?”

I smoothed my hand over the top of my head. “She was.”

After a moment of heavy quiet, I groaned and rubbed my palms against my bare thighs. “God, Sid.” My voice cracked, and I laid a hand against my chest. “I just … I miss her so fucking much.”

He nodded and swiped a finger quickly beneath his eye, blinking rapidly. “I know you do. I mean, we all miss her, but … yeah.”

I cleared my throat, coughed, and leaned forward to grab a bottle of Coke and twisted off the cap. “You know, I never told you how we got back together in the first place.”

He looked puzzled, his brow crumpling. “What do you mean? You told us you went to her place on Christmas Eve and—"

“Right,” I said. “But that’s what happened after.”

“After what?”

I took a sip, remembering that cold, cold night. The waves crashing against the rocks below. “I had driven out to the bridge. The one over here.” I pointed in the direction. “And I was standing there, ready to climb over the rail and jump.”

His expression changed from confusion to betrayal as he sat up straight, ready to move. Like he expected for me to jump right now, this second. “What the hell are you—"

“You have no idea how badly I wanted to fucking die, Sid,” I said, my voice hoarse.

“And then, with the shit my dad was saying … I just kept thinking, What the fuck is the point? There just wasn’t a reason to keep on living anymore.

But then, just like that, out of nowhere, Laura was there.

Like an angel. She stopped me from jumping and took me home. ”

The anger left his eyes as he stared. “She saved you.”

“Yeah,” I replied, nodding. “So, no, I’m not going to kill myself.

And it’s not because I don’t want to die.

I fucking do. I’ve never wanted something so badly in my life.

I want to be wherever the fuck she is instead of being here, left behind.

But I won’t do it because she saved me , and I keep thinking, She would be so fucking pissed if she spent all that time, pulling my ass away from that bridge, just for me to throw myself over it anyway.

She’d be so pissed if she was the reason for it . ”

“Yeah,” Sid replied, nodding. “She would be.”

“And I dunno,” I said, shaking my head and sucking in a deep breath.

“I keep thinking, What if there’s a reason I’m still here?

Every fucking time I could’ve died, something has stopped it from happening.

I mean, unless the reason is just to torture me for all of eternity, which, I mean, I guess it’s possible, but—"

“Nah, man. I’m with you. Everything happens for a reason—I believe that. Even if you can’t possibly understand what the reason might be. ”

“There can’t be any reason good enough for her not being here,” I said. “But there’s a reason I still am. I feel it.”

Then I stood up, collected the food from the coffee table, and headed toward the kitchen. Sid followed with the soda bottles.

“Well, until you figure it out, maybe we should do something to keep that brain of yours busy,” he suggested. “Like, maybe you should get a dog or something.”

I nodded thoughtfully. Lizzie and Jane had always wanted to get a dog, and I had told them we’d get one. I had told them about Smoky, sparing them the story of his tragic end.

His was the first life I’d helped to end.

But maybe I could do better. Maybe I could be better.

Maybe, for her, I could.

“Yeah,” I muttered, setting the food on the table. “Maybe it’s time I get a dog.”

To be continued in book two, Ebbing Tides …