The apartment smells like garlic and lemon and something that has been reheated too many times. Outside, Seabrook fog presses against the windows, blurring the college quad into a watercolor of lamp posts and skeleton trees. Evelynn moves through the kitchen like a woman who has rehearsed grief the way other people rehearse vows. Two plates. Two place settings. She took the good plates out of the cabinet—white porcelain with a hairline of blue around the rim, the ones she bought the first year she told herself she could live on black coffee and willpower. She warms the second serving in the oven even though she knows one plate will sit cold, and she tucks Ethan’s shirts over the back of a chair: the Oxford with the faint ink stain from lecture notes, the navy pullover he wore the one night they took a wrong turn after a conference and found a beach with no one else on it. She folds them with the care of someone making something last. There is a folder on the counter with neat, spidery handwriting across a tab—MILESTONES—and inside are receipts, a Pulse screenshot of a laugh he left on a post years ago, two Polaroids where she managed to get both of them smiling. Ten years—she had schemed a decade into a map: get the research fellowship, publish the paper, say something brilliant when he least expected it. She had mapped him like an anatomy chart: favorite coffee