415 days, 4 hours, 58 minutes, 31 seconds

The first day of December, the day before her birthday, three days before Chanukah, 30 degrees out, he goes to visit a friend and comes home having lost one of the gloves she gave him for Chanukah years ago. While he’s away she reads an article about a website set up to unite gloves with their owners, but that’s only in Pittsburgh. For now. The flowers he sent her are delivered while he’s out, and she has to hobble down the stairs to receive them, then hobble back up, terrified of that final step, no one to hang onto.