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Raven laughing because I'd somehow managed to burn toast.

Raven curled against me on the couch with a book in her lap.

Raven reaching for my hand.

The sound of the funeral director asking if I was ready.

I wasn't.

I never would be.

Then she's back in the kitchen again, smiling at me as if nothing bad has ever happened.

The bathroom remains empty. Of course it does. She’s dead. I know she’s dead. I watched them close the casket. I stood beside the grave while the ground opened and swallowed every promise I ever made to her.

Knowing has never been the problem.

Living with it is.

I stumble back into the room and find another bottle inside the duffel on the floor. I don’t remember buying two, but I’m grateful to the version of me who did. The cap is still sealed. It takes me three tries to break it open.

The whiskey burns hotter this time.

I drink until the memory of black vanilla begins to feel less like a miracle and more like something my mind invented because it couldn’t survive another second without her.

Hours pass, though I only know because the light beyond the window changes from gray to gold and then begins to fade. At some point, I lie back across the bed without taking off my boots. The bottle rests against my chest, rising and falling with each breath.

I close my eyes.

The mattress shifts.

Barely.

So little that I might’ve imagined it, the same way I imagined her shampoo filling the room. The bed gives beside me, a gentle dip in the space where another body would settle.

My hand tightens around the bottle.

I don’t move.

I don’t breathe.

The warmth comes quietly, not against my skin but somewhere deeper, in the hollow place grief carved through me and left open.

“Raven?”

There’s no answer.

I keep my eyes closed because I already know what I’ll find if I open them. Yellowed walls. A dark television, and an empty bed.

For one second, I let myself believe she’s sitting beside me.

I imagine her reaching for the bottle and taking it from my hand, her fingers brushing mine as she sets it on the nightstand. I imagine the look she’d give me, sad and disappointed but still filled with the kind of love I never deserved.

She wouldn’t yell. She’d look at me like she could still see the man I used to be beneath everything I’ve done to bury him.

“I don’t know how to do this,” I whisper.

My voice breaks on the final word.