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i
Sometimes I wake up and, for a brief moment, you are alive, Gabe. In that blurry place between dreams and reality, you're smiling, your arms are wrapped around me. You're saying, "I love you, Lucy. I will love you until the day I die . . . and then some," just like you whispered to me when we went hiking in Cold Spring two decades ago. We'd climbed to the top of the Bull Hill trail and were taking in the most breathtaking view of the Hudson River. Your whispered words, the reverence with which you said them, made me shiver, made me lean back, turn my head and kiss you, hard and deep, like I needed to show you that I'd love you until the day I died and then some, too.
I forgot about those words for years, but they've come back to me recently. Come back to me in those liminal moments, when I'm not quite asleep, but not quite awake.
And then the sun brightens, or the alarm goes off, and it hits me. You're gone.
I wonder, particularly on those days, about the "and then some." Is there a piece of you somewhere that loves me still? Or is it all in the past? Are we ancient history, and am I the archivist, keeping it alive?
ii
The day your editor Eric Weiss called me, nearly nine years after the last time I'd spoken to him, was one of those cold winter days when the wind was so biting it made my skin feel brittle and my eyes tear.
I was in my office in Manhattan, reading through the most recent episode of Tiger & Bunny, the new TV series I've been producing, when my cell phone rang. I saw Eric's name and couldn't imagine why he was calling.
"Hello?" I answered, making a split-second decision not to let him go to voice mail.
"Lucy!" he said. "It's Eric Weiss from the Associated Press."
"Hi," I said, still not sure why he was calling me.
"So . . . I'm sure I don't need to tell you that the ten-year anniversary of Gabriel's death is approaching." He paused.
"July twenty-fifth," I said. The date you died is tattooed on my heart. At that moment I knew you'd been gone for exactly nine years, six months, and fourteen days. I looked out the window and saw the water in the Hudson River dance in the wind. I wondered if you were dancing with it.
"Yes," he said softly. "Well, the AP would like to do a retrospective of his work and give our readers an update on how the places he photographed are doing now."
"Oh-" I started to say, but Eric continued.
"I took the liberty of calling the publisher of Gabe's book, Defiant. They'd like to update the book with some never-before-seen photos and maybe an afterword that I'd write," he said. "But, of course, we wanted to check with you first."
I was surprised. It often felt like I was the only one who still thought about you. But it seemed like Eric did, too. I lifted up the tortoiseshell glasses I had just started wearing so my computer screen wouldn't look so blurry and wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my sweater.
"That would be a beautiful celebration of Gabe's life," I said.
"I'm so glad you think so," Eric replied. "We'll need you to go through his photographs and find the original files for a number of images. I can email you the list. Do you think you can find them?"
I thought about your boxes in my bedroom closet. The ones hidden behind my long dresses. One of them open, the other two still sealed shut.
"Yes," I said. "I can do that. Just let me know what you need."
"Will do," he said. "And Lucy?"
"Yes?" I said.
He paused. "Thank you." But I had the feeling it wasn't what he'd intended to say.
We hung up, and I stared out the window, thinking about the first time Eric had called me, to tell me you'd been hurt and were in a hospital in Jerusalem, that he didn't think you'd recover. Sitting at my desk now, I closed my eyes and climbed into my last memory of you, of your skin against mine, the soft sheets of the hospital bed, the steady whoosh of the machines keeping you alive. I remembered how I rested your hand on my stomach so you could feel Samuel inside me. Your son, our son.
"Lucy?"
I turned my chair away from the window at the sound of Versha's voice.
"I'm here," I said to her. "I was just thinking."
She nodded. As my assistant for the past three years, she knew that staring out the window and thinking was often how I worked through problems or came up with new ideas.
"It's five thirty," she said. "I'm going to head home, unless you need something else from me."
I smiled at her and shook my head. "I'm all good here. Thanks for checking."
"See you tomorrow, then." She turned away, then turned back. "Hope the earmuffs are keeping you warm. Noticed you were wearing them today."
"Very warm," I said. "But are you supposed to be able to hear in them? Everything sounds like I'm underwater."
She nodded solemnly. "It's the trade-off for being trendy."
I laughed and shook my head. "Have a good night," I said as she walked out the door laughing, too.
You'd like Versha, Gabe. She's whip-smart and really funny. And on an endless quest to make me trendy, which is more a running joke now than anything else. I've been lobbying Phil to promote her, because I know if we don't, she'll go somewhere else soon, and I hate the idea of losing her-both professionally and personally. Ever since I lost you, and then Darren and I divorced, ever since we finalized our custody arrangement so I only have the kids with me every other week, the idea of losing more people I care about makes my heart clench.
Since that first week of February wasn’t one of my weeks with the kids, I stayed late to finish up the script and email my notes to the writers. It was nearly seven when I emerged from my Tiger & Bunny zone and started gathering up my cold-weather gear to head home to Brooklyn.
As I did, the conversation with Eric filtered back into my brain. And once it was there, it was all I could think about. I found his email with a list of photographs attached. The whole ride back to Brooklyn, I wondered what it would be like-having a whole world to talk about you with again, instead of just Kate and Eva. What would it mean for me? And what would it mean for Sammy?
iii
Once I got home, I made myself a quick PB&J for dinner and then headed upstairs to my bedroom closet, pushed my long dresses aside, and retrieved your boxes, which had been waiting there patiently for me. When the kids are around, I never touch your things. But sometimes, when they're away, when things feel extra hard, when I'm especially lonely, I open up that first box and take out your old Columbia sweatshirt. When I put it on, I give myself permission to live inside our memories for a moment, an hour, an evening. It's getting harder to remember some of the details, but there are certain memories I don't think I'll ever forget. Like the day we made Samuel.
I close my eyes and build the hotel room around us, picture the blond curls of your hair, feel the smoothness of your skin, and when I touch myself, I imagine it's you. You, stroking me so lightly, so gently. You, sliding inside, feeling how much I want you. You, moving against me until I orgasm.
I don't do it often, but when I do, I remember joy-until it's over and the ache of loneliness returns.
I was thinking the other day, while reading Madame Bovary, about how in French orgasms are called la petite mort-the little death. Could it be that that's what it feels like after death? Do you live in a world filled with that intense beauty, that mind-blowing sensation? Is there a world of even more potent pleasure that awaits us, bright and beautiful? I can't get this question out of my mind, and I wish you could answer it for me. What comes next? Or is there nothing at all?
That night, I pulled all three of your boxes out of my closet. I knew the first box contained the physical items of yours I'd kept-your Columbia sweatshirt, of course, the baseball cap you had on the day we met, your unfinished copy of All the Light We Cannot See, an old photograph of you and your mom you'd had framed and displayed in your Jerusalem apartment, another one of you and me at Faces & Names, the scarf I knitted you however many Christmases ago.
I put your sweatshirt on over the wool sweater I'd worn to work and rolled up the sleeves that were far too long on me. Then, with the post of one of my earrings, I pierced the cheap packing tape I'd used to bind up your things. Inside the second box was your laptop-silly of me to save it, I know, but I thought perhaps one day there might be something on it I'd need and wouldn't be able to access otherwise. Your phone was there, too. Your camera. I thought I might give that to Samuel when he was old enough.
With your sweatshirt engulfing my body, surrounded by the things you left behind, looking at the photograph of you and your mother both smiling Samuel's smile, I thought about the secret that Darren and I had kept all these years. The secret that I knew we would have to share at some point. I wanted our son to know about you, about your intelligence, your talent, your eye for beauty and your determination to find it everywhere. But I hadn't told him anything. I hadn't even told him he was yours.
The last box I opened was the one I was looking for: the prints of the photographs you'd had filed in a drawer in your apartment, packed neatly into envelopes by date and location, a flash drive in each one with the original files. I dumped the box upside down to get all the envelopes out and started looking at labels-it pulled at my heart to see your handwriting. When my friend Julia's dad died a few years ago, she got his handwriting tattooed on her wrist, copied from the bottom of the last note he sent her. Now her wrist says Love, Dad. Staring at those envelopes I wondered if there was something you'd written I could get tattooed on my wrist, an external symbol of how much you are part of me.
I started putting the envelopes in chronological order, and then a small piece of paper fell from the stack. It was torn off the back of an envelope, not the manila kind you'd kept your prints in, but a light blue mailing envelope. It looked like a return address. In beautiful cursive handwriting it said: Via Conte Verde, 68 #5A, 00185 Roma, Italia. Underneath the address, you'd doodled the face of a boy with dark curly hair and wide, dark eyes.
A tumble of questions ran through my brain: When were you in Rome and what were you doing there? Who was writing to you? Who was that boy? And why did you keep this address?
I pulled out my phone and texted Eric Weiss.
Found all Gabe's flash drives. I'll have the images to you by Monday.
Great, he wrote back. Thank you.
My thumbs hovered over the keyboard and then I typed: Did you send Gabe to Rome often?
The three dots started then stopped then started then stopped again. I stared at my phone until a paragraph appeared: I'm sure we must have at some point, he wrote. Though I don't remember it as an ongoing thing. Gabe did work on a powerful story of the Syrian refugees coming through Lampedusa not long before he died. He got a World Press photo award for one of the images he took there. He may have flown in and out of Rome to get to Lampedusa.
Thanks, I typed back, pulling the paper out of my pocket and looking again at the beautiful handwriting, the drawing of the boy. Just curious.
Was it destiny that made me find that address? I still wonder. Was it you? It's that old question of mine: Fate or free will? How are our lives designed? I'm still wondering, Gabe. And I probably always will be.
Because that address, it led to so much.
iv
The next morning, I texted Kate while I was on the subway to work: Lunch still good today?
Looking forward, she wrote back. Need to discuss! I knew she was commuting, too, on a Metro-North train from Stamford, Connecticut. We'd made this lunch date because of a new job she'd just had a third-round interview for that she wanted my opinion on.
Looking forward too, I said.
Whenever I was with Kate, just the two of us, a part of me felt like I was twenty-two again, living with her in that amazing apartment her parents rented to us on the Upper East Side. Or sometimes I felt like I was fourteen and we were at the Westport Plaza Shopping Mall, trying to figure out which lip gloss colors looked best with our skin tones. Or sometimes even like we were five, having just met in kindergarten and squealing because we both were wearing the same T-shirt with Rainbow Brite on it. Kate has known so many versions of me, and I have known so many versions of her.
At noon, I layered on my winter coat and my trendy earmuffs and walked over to Iris, a newish restaurant halfway between our offices.
Before I could even take off my earmuffs, Kate came in, her pink cheeks almost the same blush color as her long cashmere coat.
"Iris is someone," Kate said when we sat down. "From history or Greek myths or something. Not just a flower, right?"
"She's the messenger of the gods in Greek mythology," I answered. "And the personification of the rainbow. I read somewhere that there's a theory Siri, on our phones, is named after her. Iris backward."
"Of course you would know that," Kate said, smiling at me as she opened the menu.
Remember when you called me a Pegasus, Gabe? You said when you were with me, I carried you away from the pain. From the ugliness. I still connect Greek mythology to you, though I don't know if we ever talked about Iris. The thought of you tugged at my heart.
Copyright © 2026 by Jill Santopolo. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
