The Night My Grief Broke

The glass hit the hardwood and exploded into pieces before I even realized I had let it fall.

I had come home from the cemetery, from staring at a stone with my daughter’s name on it, and walked straight into my study like I had done every night for the past three months. I didn’t turn on the overhead lights. I liked the room half–dark, lit only by the brass desk lamp and the strip of moonlight leaking in through the balcony doors.

In one hand, I still held the small silver locket I had left on the grave and then taken back, unable to part with it. In the other, apparently, I had been holding a tumbler of water. The locket stayed. The glass didn’t.

My hand shook so badly I had to sit down.

People in Burlington said I was “drowning in grief,” that I was “not myself” since the fire. The house at the edge of town—the one where my daughter, Chloe, had been staying with friends for the weekend—had gone up in flames in the middle of the night. By the time the trucks arrived, there was nothing left but black beams and smoke. They told me there were remains. They told me there was no doubt.

There had been a service. A closed casket. A polished stone with her name.