7:30am You turn off the hot water and reach for a towel. Your thoughts are scattered this morning, a mix of work deadlines and familial obligations. As you step from the shower, your big toe grazes the slippery metal lip and for the briefest of moments, you picture yourself tripping, flying through the warm foggy air, landing face-first on the floor. Your mind can see it, the blood rushing from your mouth, red rivulets dripping down your chin. Your tongue slides into a large gummy gap where your two front teeth used to be, and you let out a strangled cry. One of your incisors—a tiny ivory nugget with its brick-red root—is lying on the floor. The other has been pushed backward by the blunt force of the fall and is lodged in your mouth at a 90-degree angle. You spit out some of the blood and swallow the rest, but your stomach squeezes it back up, causing you to cough and gag. You lie there on the floor, wet and shivering and naked. Hot throbbing pain roars in your ears and the last thing you hear before passing out is the sound of your husband banging on the bathroom door, oblivious to everything, as he urges you to hurry, to move faster, to give him a goddamn turn in there already. 9:00am When you’re dressed and ready for work, you lock the house and get in your car. You take a moment to pull up a playlist titled Songs That Save Me, a mix of indie and alt-rock music that jumpstarts your heart, that makes you believe in clean slates and endless possibilities, even on your toughest days. The opening notes of Fire Escape by Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness waltz through the speakers as you slowly back out of the driveway, counting to five and looking both ways. Still, your mind insists that you may have missed something, someone, a child in your rearview mirror. He is too little, perhaps, too short, to see over the trunk of your Toyota Camry. But when you feel a bump, hear a small crunch, at first you figure it's a tree branch, or some pebbles on the asphalt; you won't yet understand what has happened. It’s only when a woman runs out of the neighboring house screaming, "Stop! My son!" that you slam on the brakes. But it’s too late; the car has already crushed this little boy's bones. You get out and see his twig-like legs, mangled and spread on the sidewalk at odd angles, blood blurring the pavement. A small red-smeared soccer ball rolls by your feet and you dry-heave, over and over, until tears and snot run down your face, and you vow right then and there never to get behind the wheel again, not if your recklessness might one day take a child’s life. 10:00am Traffic is terrible this morning. When you finally make it to work, your body collapses into your desk chair. A sense of relief washes over you, a deep exhalation of pent-up nerves. You feel proud, triumphant even, after overcoming this morning’s hurdles, and you’re hopeful that these thought-spirals will now crawl back into the recesses of your mind, for a little while anyway. You close your eyes and allow yourself a moment of delicious tranquility before turning your attention to the computer screen. Your inbox is full. Flooded, really. Partnership requests, internship queries, writing submissions. You suppose it comes with the territory when you’re the nonfiction director of a literary nonprofit. The next few minutes are spent taking stock of the demands, divvying them up into categories: urgent, high priority, and wait-‘til-next-week. Before buckling down, you send a quick check-in to the author you’re currently working with, a celebrity of sorts, a debut-writer-turned-household-name. She is…SHIT. You notice a typo in the email, front and center. But you’ve already hit send.  Dear _____, Thank you for you patience.  Your thoughts begin to stretch and yawn, emerging from their short-lived hibernation. How could you have been so careless? Your credibility as an editor is shot to hell now. You’re supposed to catch these kinds of mistakes, not make them. Word will soon get out that your editing services are sub-par. Not just yours, in fact, but the entire editorial staff at the organization that employs you. It’s only a matter of time before your publication’s authors pull their work from its pages. Donors will follow suit, back out and pull their funding. They’ll leave your nonprofit to fend for itself. What will happen, you wonder, to all of the people who need its programming? What about the college grads desperate for an internship? Or the low-income writers in search of an agent? Most of all, what will happen to the women in the correctional facilities, the ones who say your nonprofit’s workshop is the only thing that gets them out of bed each morning, the only thing that injects joy into their routine, that offers them a sense of purpose? You feel sick to your stomach as you sit there, staring at the typo, and for the remainder of the morning, all you can think about are the lives you might have just destroyed. 1:15pm You could really use a cup of coffee after the morning you’ve had. On your lunch break, you decide to stretch your legs and take a stroll to the nearest café, a cute little corner store that screams Hipster Hangout, complete with cozy brown couches, free wifi, and caffeinated ice cream floats. Your ex was practically an addict, you recall, as you amble down the street. Barely got by on three cups a day. You only picked up this habit, this need for a mid-day caffeine kick, years later, when he was already gone from your life. But you think he’d be shocked—nay, proud—to see you now, to learn that you have a usual: black with a bit of unsweetened almond milk and a packet of Stevia. You’re picturing his smile, the deep dimple in his cheek, when you suddenly freeze. Is that… him? You squint, wondering if your eyes are playing tricks on you. But it’s him. Right? You swear it’s him, standing there, just halfway down the block, like your thoughts have conjured him here to this very place and time. You’d recognize the back of that head anywhere, the broad shoulders and slow stride. Even the thick brown hair—reddish in the sun and a dash of salt and pepper at the temples—makes you confident in your assessment. Yes, you think. That’s the back of his head. And it looks good, if you’re being honest. You bet the front of him does too. In fact, he probably looks a lot better than you these days. You’re suddenly hyper-aware of your appearance, mediocre at best with your hair thrown in a pony and a pencil skirt that no longer hugs you quite right. For as long as you can remember, you’ve dreamed of this moment, of dazzling him with desire when you run into each other for the first time post-split, of making him miss what he so cruelly gave up. If he sees you now, in your current state, you’re afraid it’ll only validate his decision all those years ago, make him glad he left. You just know that he’ll laugh about it later when he grabs a drink with his new younger-than-you girlfriend. Look babe, he’ll say as he pulls out his phone to show her a picture he snapped when you weren’t looking. Look who I ran into today. Can you believe we ever dated?, he’ll ask, shaking his head before draining his beer. He might even post the photo to Facebook. Man, you definitely upgraded, his friends will say, congratulating him with a clap on the back. And because the world can be so very small, one of those friends will happen to be an acquaintance of your husband. Which, of course, means the photo will appear on his newsfeed by the end of the week. He’ll click on it, curious to see the difference between you and Younger-Than-You. Comparing the pictures will shake him up, make him realize that he could’ve done better, way better. That really, he settled by choosing to be with you. It might not happen overnight, but eventually he’ll leave. You just know it. You can’t bear that. You can’t even bear the thought of losing him, his even-keeled and calming presence. He might not know what goes on inside your head, but the way he knows how to bring you back from a spiral—by bringing you cold water, by telling you to take your time, to take deep breaths—centers you, again and again, every day. Who else could love you with that sort of kindness? Panic begins to flare, first in your stomach and then up, up into your throat. And just like that, you turn and hightail it out of there, before your ex spots you standing there in all your mediocre glory. Before he snaps that damn photo. You run all the way back to the office, determined to save your marriage, coffee completely forgotten. 5:30pm You want to do something nice for your husband, what with everything that happened earlier. As you wrap up at work and make your way to the car, you mull over the prospect of cooking him a fancy dinner, something you typically only do for Shabbat. During the week he likes to grab something quick, easy. Mac ‘n cheese or avocado toast. A bowl of cereal, even. But maybe you’ll make him teriyaki salmon tonight. You haven’t had that in a while. Or perhaps tilapia, if you can find some at the store. So instead of heading home, you drive to the supermarket. When you get to the glass counter, you’re pleased to see tilapia in their fish-on-ice lineup. You place your order and watch as the man wraps the fish in white wax paper. He weighs the package, labels it with the price, and hands it over. You thank him and turn to walk away, but he calls after you. “Watch out for the bones!” He’s joking, you know. You can tell by the twinkle in his eye, the way his crow’s feet crinkle. But as you continue up the aisle to the front of the store, the thought-spirals unfurl. He’s right, you think. Fish bones are no laughing matter, and this simple gesture, this attempt at wine-and-dine romance, could go horribly wrong. In fact, you can already picture it, the plateful of food as you set it down in front of your husband: a cheesy glaze drizzled over the fish; golden potatoes seasoned to perfection; green asparagus glistening with garlic sauce. You hold hands and smile at each other from across the gray folding table in your dining room. The two of you don’t own any nice furniture yet, but you think there’s something romantic about this makeshift seating. You like to think of it as a symbol of hope, a physical reminder that there’s still more in this life to look forward to. Furniture shopping. Family dinners. A home that feels lived in. And as you sit there together at the bare plastic table, you share a couple of laughs recounting the day before your husband picks up a fork and digs in. To your delight, the tender yellow flesh melts in his mouth. He closes his eyes and makes a little sound, a sigh of satisfaction. But then you hear another noise, a scratchy throat-clearing cough. Your husband’s eyes water and bulge as the little fish bone scrapes its way down his esophagus. He claws wildly at the table, begging you for help, but you don’t know the Heimlich maneuver, always meant to learn but never did. Helpless, you watch in horror as he chokes on your romantic gesture, gasping and gagging before going blue. 8:45pm Later, when you and your husband are sitting on the couch flipping channels, he brings up the subject of vacation. Just think, he says, a romantic Italian getaway. He's been dreaming about it for weeks, that precious time spent away from everything and everyone. He moves to the computer desk and pulls up Priceline to do some preliminary research on flights. You barely hear him when he asks if you'd want a window seat, and he misjudges your silence. Okay, aisle it is!, he says with a smile. What you really want is to suggest that the two of you take separate flights, that you just meet up on the Amalfi coast. But you can hear how ridiculous it sounds, can see your husband's face, the way his eyebrows will furrow in confusion. It’s just...you can’t help but wonder: what if the plane goes down with both of you onboard? The number of loved ones left behind—the number of people who will grieve—is unbearable to think about. In fact, the ex you saw-but-didn’t-see earlier today once told you his parents never flew anywhere together. You know, just in case the plane goes down. ‘Cause then at least we’d still have one parent. You and your husband don’t have kids just yet, but you believe there’s some merit to this line of thinking. Yes, you rationalize. Better to fly separately, minimize the heartbreak. You tune back in to your husband, who is now considering a coastal drive down the Amalfi shoreline. We can finally cross it off the bucket list, he says, eyes wide with excitement. He’s right—this has been a longtime dream of yours. But now that it might actually happen, now that a plan has been put in motion, you pause to really think about what a trip like this would entail. You picture the two of you driving around in a cute European car, following the curvy roads along coastal cliffs, ooohing and aaahing over lapis-blue waters before easing into a hairpin turn. You slow down and pull over as another car comes flying past, but in a flash, you teeter, veer off the edge, and your cute little car plummets down, down, down. You scream his name, JEREMYYYY, an incoherent howl that spouts from your mouth, the sound full of fear and love and goodbye, the very last word you utter before your bodies snap in half. You lie in the dirt, deep down in the belly of a forested gorge, with car scraps and rubber burning all around as swarms of insects rise with the smoke. Buried above ground, you stay that way, your flesh rotting and breaking down—until a couple of hikers happen upon the wreckage, months later. They pause to take pictures, hoping the images go viral on TikTok or Snapchat. And just like that, your entire life—your beautiful love story and legacy—will vanish amongst the millions of social-media posts, automatically set to self-destruct after just one day, never to be found again. 11:30pm You draw back the covers, fluff your favorite pillow, and lay your body down against the smooth cool sheets. Finally, you think. Another day, done. You sigh as you sink into the memory-foam mattress. Your husband, who fell into bed approximately 5.2 seconds ago, is already gone, already in la-la land, likely dreaming of hockey stats and interest rates. Must be nice, you muse. You have no idea what it’s like to end the evening like that. Most of the time, you're scared to say goodnight, scared that it won’t be goodnight but goodbye, scared that the kiss you just gave each other before rolling over and shutting the lights will be the last one, that you’ll wake before dawn and find his body blue and cold to the touch. But tonight, like every other night, you try to force these thoughts from your mind, force your body to rest, to release these anxieties. Because tomorrow, it all begins again.