At 3:17 in the morning the police rang to tell me my husband had been killed in a crash, while he was asleep beside me with one leg over mine. The officer said: leave the room without waking the man next to you.

Almost always between one and three in the morning.

And on at least eleven of those nights, my husband was already in the apartment with me.

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PART 2 — THE SEVENTIETH

Cassian and I met in 2018 and married in 2020.

He is a structural technician for a firm that does bridges and he is the single most predictable human being I have ever loved. Same coffee. Same route. Same three shirts.

His mother is Sabine Pellier and she is seventy-one and lives eleven miles away, and she is warm and social and there is one door in that woman that has never opened.