Chapter 2: The Cold
The cold was not ordinary winter chill. It had weight. It had settled into the walls the way damp settles into clothes left too long on a line.
I sat in James’s chair until my fingers stiffened, then forced myself up and tried the thermostat. The display was blank. I flipped the hall switch. Nothing. The breaker panel in the utility closet showed several switches tripped. When I reset them, the lights returned in a weak, uneven way, but the furnace only clicked once and stayed dead. The house had been without heat for days—maybe longer. While I had been identifying a body and choosing a casket, the temperature here had fallen far enough to make the air hurt.
I found a flashlight, checked the main rooms, and stopped in the kitchen doorway.
Water covered the floor in a thin, dark sheet. It ran from the cabinet under the sink in a slow, steady pulse. Somewhere behind the wall, a pipe had given up. The ceiling in the corner sagged with a brown bloom of moisture. The refrigerator hummed on borrowed power and then stuttered. James’s mug still sat beside the coffee maker, a film of old liquid at the bottom. I stood in the doorway and listened to the water and the rain and the absence of any human voice that belonged to me.
I called the emergency line for the utility company and was placed on hold. I called a twenty-four-hour plumber and got a recording. I texted Troy a photo of the water and the blank thermostat. He answered after eleven minutes.
Troy: Call maintenance or a handyman. In a meeting.
My mother did not answer. My father sent a thumbs-up emoji to the photo, as if acknowledging a weather report.
I dropped towels across the worst of the kitchen water until the linen closet was empty. The cold worked into my coat. My phone battery sat at twelve percent. I plugged it into a charger that only worked when the cord was held at a certain angle. Outside, the rain thickened. Inside, the house continued its quiet failure—pipe, furnace, lights—while I moved from room to room like a visitor who had arrived too late to prevent damage and too early to be rescued from it.
In the upstairs hallway the air was even colder. I opened the bedroom door and saw my breath. The bed was still made from the morning we had left for a trip that was supposed to be short. James’s sweater hung on the chair. I closed the door again because grief and cold in the same small space made it hard to stand upright.
May you like
Downstairs I sat on the stairs with the flashlight across my knees and waited for a call back that did not come. The water under the sink kept spreading. My hands shook for reasons that had nothing to do with sadness alone. Exhaustion had begun to feel like a physical object sitting on my chest. I thought about the group chat, about No problem, about dinner with the Hendersons. Then I thought about the smell of James’s cologne on a shirt now damp from terminal floors and rain.
I did not cry. Crying required heat I did not have.
