The intake form asked for losses, and Tomás had filled it out with precision: his wife, three years ago, cancer; his business, two years later, the usual accumulation of bad timing; his daughter, not dead but estranged, in a way that was its own kind of absence; his health, which had been declining in small unspectacular ways for a decade.
The form had a box at the bottom that Reyes had added herself, not required, just a question: what are you hoping to find?
Tomás had written: I don't know. I think that's why I'm here.
She had seen that answer before. Not in words, but in posture: the particular way people sat when they had stopped pretending. She had been working with the bereaved for nine years and she knew the difference between someone who was performing their loss and someone who was standing in it. Tomás was standing in it. He was very still.
"Walk me through what a day looks like now," she said.
He did. It was ordinary. He woke at six, made coffee, sat with it. He read, sometimes. He walked. He cooked simple things and ate them alone. He called his sister on Tuesdays.
"And what does it feel like?" she said. "Not the grief. What does the day itself feel like?"
He was quiet for a while. "Like the first day of something," he said. "Not a good something or a bad something. Just: first."
She wrote it down. She had a private notebook, separate from her case files, where she wrote what her clients said when they answered this particular question. She had been asking it for two years and she had not told anyone she was asking it, or what she was collecting. She did not have a name yet for what she was studying. She knew only that these specific people, the ones who had lost the last thing and were still sitting across from her and speaking with this particular quality of attention, had something she kept wanting to look at directly.
She closed the file at the end of the session and opened the notebook and wrote down what Tomás had said about the first day of something.
Then she looked at the other entries. There were forty-one of them.
She had not noticed, until she looked at them together, that they all said more or less the same thing.