WE ARRIVE home to find that food and flowers, gifts and cards have been dropped off in droves. Containers of baked goods are piling up on the kitchen table.

For dinner, Dale has ordered Chinese food from our favourite restaurant. I sit at our dining room table and try to eat but all I can think of is the first night Sam and I spent in this house. We’d ordered dinner from this same restaurant and eaten it at this table, planning the next chapter of our life together—which wasn’t supposed to end three years later. I stand up and slide my dinner into Sasha’s dish.

“Goo,” Harry says, “you have to eat.”

I force a smile. “Never thought I’d hear those words.”

I take a chocolate chip cookie from the stack of baking and then open the china cabinet where the liquor is stashed. I pour myself a glass of sherry—an evening ritual Sam and I enjoyed on occasion. When I wander into the living room, a dozen eyeballs watch my every move.

I sit on the couch and sip my sherry, glaring at the stairs. Katrina asks how I feel about going to bed tonight.

“I want him here.”

“But that can’t be,” she says softly. “You know that, right?”

I nod, watching as tears well up in her eyes.

“I’m sorry!” she cries. “This is just so unfair.”

I sigh. “Where do you think he is right now?”

“Heaven.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Because I can’t just be grasping at straws here. When I go upstairs, I have to know that Sam can somehow hear me talking to him.”

“I believe Sam is here, too,” Ed says from where he’s sitting on the stairs. “I think his spirit lives on in you, Adri.”

“Yeah…”

“Who knows,” he continues, “maybe when you go up to bed and talk to Sam, you’re actually talking to yourself.”

Kaboom. I leap off the couch. “Thank you very fucking much!” I scream, hurling a cookie at his head.

He ducks, and it bounces off the wall. Sasha cowers beside me.

“Oh my God,” he says. “I am so sorry. I…I didn’t mean that in a bad way.”

I glare at him, hands on my hips. “How else am I supposed to take that?”

“There is a time and a place for a philosophical discussion,” Katrina cuts in, “and I don’t think this is it.”

My devastated brother creeps off to the kitchen as Katrina begins damage control.

“Everyone has their own beliefs and that’s fine. You need to listen to your own heart, Adri.”

I down the rest of my sherry as the fear, confusion and anxiety build again.

“You and Sam shared a beautiful love,” she adds. “Hold onto that.”

But Ed’s sentence hangs in mid-air, taunting me. How could Sam exist in me?

I stomp downstairs to collect some pictures of our now historical beautiful love to put in my bedroom. I find a classic Sam & Adri selfie—taken in Banff when we were twenty-one. Two young, naïve faces smile tentatively at the camera. Sam with jet-black hair and a diamond stud in his ear, me with my toothy smile. I see a second photo taken three months ago, another selfie taken on the beach in Vancouver. Sam has plenty of gray hair and I’ve got crow’s feet, but our smiles are the same.

Now, after eleven and a half years, multiple break-ups, two university degrees, a few trips, dozens of jobs, some spectacular fights, lots of awesome sex, a wedding, a police graduation, a broken ankle, and countless conversations over coffee, it’s all over. These photos are the bookends of our life together. The present has become hell on earth and my future looms ahead like a sixty-five-year prison sentence, so the past is looking damn appealing. I grab my precious pictures and go into our bedroom to begin building a photographic shrine to Sam.

I’m already in bed when I think, what the heck? I run back downstairs, fill a sherry glass full of water for Sam’s soul to sip, then take it into my room and place it among the photos.

WAKING UP Sunday morning is, to my astonishment, even more painful than yesterday. By 5:30 a.m., the precious Hope is gone. Sam is dead; I am a widow. That I will perhaps see him again in heaven does nothing to comfort me. I lie sprawled out on my bed like a starfish clinging to a rock, waiting for the tide to return.

I fantasize about what this morning should have held, had our lives continued on their probable path. Since Sam would have worked the night shift, he would’ve still been sleeping. I’d be getting up and having a coffee. Then I would’ve puttered around the house and maybe worked a little in my office. Writing? Sam would have woken up around noon and we’d have hung out in the living room, reading the newspaper—me in my big blue chair, him on the couch.

“Hey, Adri,” he would’ve said, “pass me the city section, will ya?”

I’d have handed it to him, making a cheeky comment like, “There’s more to life than just what happens on the streets of this town you know.”

“You read what you want,” he’d have said, “and I’ll read what I want.”

I’d have leapt off my chair and tackled him on the couch. Sasha would’ve jumped up to join in and we’d have tossed her the tennis ball a few times. Then Sam would have gone downstairs to the perch and watched TV while I yakked on the phone. In the late afternoon, we’d have hit the off-leash park and then stopped in at the grocery store to pick up roast chicken and potato salad for dinner…

The knock on the door comes. Katrina takes one look at me, lying on my back as tears stream onto a drenched pillow. “Uh oh.”

“This,” I sob, “isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

She sits on the end of my bed.

“How am I gonna do this?” I ask.

“Do what?”

“Live without him.”

She shakes her head. “You have to take this one day at a time.”

“I can’t even get out of bed.”

“You don’t have to. You can lie there all day if you like.”

“Good.” I scowl at the ceiling, gripping Sam’s pendants. Except that if I continue lying here thinking about how life is supposed to be, they’ll have to commit me by noon.

The doorbell rings.

“Who the hell is here at this time of day?” I snap.

“Uh well, yesterday, you asked…”

From downstairs, I recognize Jodie’s voice.

“Oh right.” Yesterday, I’d asked my best friend, Jodie, to shop for me. Between the lessons on Hope and heaven, I’d somehow squeezed in fashion: what to wear to Sam’s funeral?

Now there are two women sitting on the end of my bed staring at me, still sprawled out on my back. I struggle to sit up, but my body feels like a sack of wet sand.

“Do you guys really believe Sam’s in a better place?” I ask.

They both nod, wide-eyed.

“But what if we’re just fooling ourselves?” I say. “What if when you die, it’s all just fucking over?”

Jodie winces.

“I think you do believe Sam is in a better place,” Katrina says, “and you’re just torturing yourself by doubting everything.”

“How do we really know, though?” I ask.

“We don’t. That’s what faith is, Adri. You’re either a believer or you’re not.”

I point to the shopping bags and ask Jodie how she did with the hat and shoes.

From one bag, she produces a fetching black hat with a chiffon bow. “I bought you a couple of each, so you’d have a choice.”

I get out of bed and try on the first hat. “I love it.”

Jodie pulls out a pair of black Mary Jane heels. I put them on. “These are they.”

Katrina asks me what dress I’ll wear.

I pull the black one out of my closet. “I just wore this to the wedding in Disneyland. That’ll teach me to wear black to a wedding.”

“You’re going to look simply beautiful for Sam,” is her response.

I look in the mirror and let out a snort. In his flowered shirt, plaid boxer shorts, a fancy black hat and high-heels, my eyes tiny slits from hours of crying and all the sorrow, fear, doubt, anger, confusion and self-pity simmering below the surface, I am miles from beautiful—outside and in.