Light broke over her head like applause.

“I miss her and I miss her and I miss her,” she began. “And I wait for the feeling to end because every other feeling has ended, no matter how intense, no matter how hard—but this won’t. There’s just no end to the missing. There was life before and there’s life now. And I can’t seem to accept it. I can’t accept that I’ll have to miss her forever.

In England there was a saying used by football fans: It’s the hope that kills you. A loss is always more bitter if you let yourself dream of victory first. Low expectations, that’s how the Brits liked to live. Protectiveness dressed up as pragmatism. It was how their mother always operated. But Avery was American. She believed in hope, had eaten it

“I don’t believe in God,” she said suddenly. “And I’m not going to.” “Oh, that’s not a prerequisite.” He gave her a little wink. “But the fact you’re here tells me that something sure as hell believes in you.”

This is right for you, it would say. This is wrong. And when it spoke to her, she felt so supremely looked after, so deeply and existentially okay, its source could only be divine.

the process. She couldn’t even self-sabotage in a spontaneous way. Hedonism, she was discovering, didn’t really work when you were sober, grieving, and thirty-three.

Sometimes she said it was a dull, low ache, foreboding and inevitable, like the darkening of the sky before a storm. Sometimes it was hot electric bursts that shot and pinged through her, leaving her doubled over and gasping for air. Sometimes she said it felt like crashing waves gathering momentum and receding, her insides the beaten and

All she was asking for was comfort, a little relief. In that sense, perhaps she was no different from an addict. Weren’t all addicts looking for relief from some invisible pain? Weren’t all people?

I couldn’t handle hearing about how someone’s Higher Power never gives them anything they can’t handle. If that was the case, we wouldn’t have rape or child abuse or incest or domestic violence, and people wouldn’t develop PTSD or complex trauma or crippling drug dependencies, all of which are the direct results of being given exactly what you