I was still grieving when my husband quit his job. He immediately began making plans for my inheritance. He never expected my next decision.

I stopped in the doorway.

For most of our twenty-two-year marriage, Mark had left for work before eight, travel mug in one hand and company phone in the other, usually complaining about some distributor who had decided its problem could not wait.

Seeing him at the kitchen table in the middle of a weekday felt immediately wrong.

“Why are you home?”

Mark looked up from his laptop.

“Morning to you, too.”

“It’s Wednesday.”

“I know what day it is.”

For half a second, I assumed he had taken time off because of Dad. Walter Hail had been gone barely seventy-two hours, and I had spent the morning arguing with a florist about whether a man who considered decorative pillows a personal insult would have wanted something called Heavenly Garden at his funeral.