The apartment doesn't smell like him anymore. It smells like nothing. Like a room that's been holding its breath.
I sit on the floor by the coffee table with my phone face-down beside me. I turned the ringer off three days ago. I don't need to see it light up to know what's on it. My old email account has a number next to it now that doesn't stop climbing. I opened it once. I saw the word *homewrecker* four times in the first ten messages and then I closed it and I haven't gone back.
Someone posted the video from outside Carr Industries. Someone always does. I've seen the thumbnail without meaning to — me on my knees on the wet pavement, Charlie's blanket a pale smear against my shoulder. #CarrIndustriesHomewrecker. It trended for three days. A woman I've never met tweeted that I should lose my son for trying to trap a rich man. I didn't reply. I didn't cry either. I just turned the phone over and kept sorting.
The kitchen table is where I do it. I clear everything else off first — the salt shaker, the fruit bowl, a stack of unopened mail — and I lay things out the way he used to lay out his files. Elliot liked order. He liked knowing exactly where everything was, dated, labeled, contained. I never understood that until now.
Photographs first. Five years of them, more than I remembered taking. Him laughing at something off-camera in the diner booth where we used to sit at 2 a.m. Him asleep on this same couch with his tie still on. Charlie's first ultrasound, gray and grainy, his heart already a small crooked flutter on the screen. I sort them by year. 2019 in one pile. 2020 in another. My hands don't shake. That's the strange part. I thought they would.
Then the letters. He wrote to me in the early years, before he trusted his own voice enough to say things out loud. His handwriting was terrible — cramped, slanted, like he was in a hurry to get the words out before he changed his mind. *I don't know how to do this right,* one says. *I've never had anything I was afraid to lose before.* I read that one twice and then I put it face-down on the pile with the others.
Last, I lay the cremation certificate on top. Charlie Carr. Date of birth. Date of death. Nineteen days apart from what should have been a whole life. I look at it for a long time. Then I square the edges so it lines up with the papers underneath.
My phone buzzes once, a voicemail notification, and I almost don't listen to it. But I do.
"Hey. It's Sophie. Sophie Adler, from The Plaza, we did the Whitfield gala together back in — doesn't matter." A pause, the sound of a door closing somewhere behind her voice. "I heard what happened. All of it. I'm not gonna pretend I know what to say." Another pause, longer. "I work the Carr-Reyes wedding next Saturday. There's a service entrance on 58th, staff use it after four. Sound system's got a Bluetooth override panel in the east prep corridor, second door past the ice machine. I'm leaving a lanyard in the trash can outside my building on Amsterdam. The blue one, by the stoop." A breath. "I don't know anything about any of this. I never called you. Take care of yourself, Elia."
I play it three times. Then I delete it, the way she'd want me to.
I call the crematorium the next morning. My voice comes out steady, which surprises me less than it used to. They tell me the urn will be ready Thursday. Small, brushed pewter, the size of a shoebox. I don't ask if there are other options. I don't need it to be beautiful. I just need it to be his.
The rest goes fast, once I start. I close my bank accounts in person, sitting across from a teller who asks if everything's alright and I say yes, thank you, in a voice that doesn't belong to anyone I recognize. I change my number and give the new one to no one. I go through every account I've ever had — email, the cloud drive where I kept five years of photos before I printed the ones that mattered, the social media I stopped checking after the wedding announcement — and I delete them one by one, watching the little confirmation windows pop up and disappear. *Are you sure you want to permanently delete this account?* Yes. I am sure.
The blanket is the last thing. Pale yellow, uneven stitches, softer now than when I made it because Charlie slept under it every night he had. I hold it up to my face and breathe in and there's nothing left of him in it, not really, just wool and the ghost of a smell that might be my imagination. I fold it into a square. I set it in a cardboard box with the things I'm not taking — old sweaters, a chipped mug, a photo frame with no photo in it.
Then I buy a black dress. Plain, high-necked, nothing that draws the eye. I hang it in the closet next to the empty space where my things used to be, and I look at it for a long moment, the way you look at a door you already know you're going to walk through.
Saturday is five days away.
I fold the ticket to London into the front pocket of my carry-on, next to where the urn will go, and I zip it shut.