of the stack of mail. Same with her Southern Coast, a magazine her father teased her mercilessly for loving, since it was not owned by her family company, McCann Media.
Maybe it’s because men bounce back faster and move on with their lives. People kept telling me, “At least you don’t have kids. You can make a clean break.”
They didn’t get it. I wanted to be a father, and I would have given anything for a kid with Greer’s blond hair and fearlessness. My wife was born bold. She didn’t take any prisoners and took down anything that got in her way. Anything except for ovarian cancer, which proved to be her kryptonite.
I lifted my head from my cereal bowl and glanced over at the neat stack of large black Moleskine journals on the white quartz counter. Greer was a creature of habit, introspective. She was the kind of person life coaches would call “self-aware.” Those journals were part of her daily routine. Sometimes she wrote a lot. Sometimes a little. Every entry, from the mundane to the extraordinary, was a part of the woman who had been so steadfast and confident that I’d believed she was invincible. I never would have imagined that I would be sitting here alone at the table she’d picked out—like she had everything in this house—over a bowl of soggy cereal, in the small Palm Beach home we had purchased six years earlier. The view of the Intracoastal didn’t seem nearly as awe-inspiring now that she was gone.
As I raised the spoon to my mouth I could almost hear Greer saying, Cereal has no nutritional value. She would have been in the kitchen throwing all varieties of plant matter into the Vitamix, going over the day’s schedule, and making something that looked disgusting but somehow tasted amazing. Although she would have been doing that at six, not nearly eleven. Now I stayed at the office almost all night sometimes. I was in charge of Mergers and Acquisitions for McCann Media, which meant my days revolved around finding new publications to purchase and transitioning their teams into the world of McCann once I did. That often meant corporate restructuring, which wasn’t always savory. But someone had to do it.
After Greer died, I couldn’t sleep, so I had rearranged my schedule, grabbing a few hours of rest in the early morning before heading back to the office. If he didn’t approve, the boss—my father-in-law—never said so. Everyone was still treating me like I’d crumble if they looked at me wrong. I would.
This morning I crumbled at the thought of Greer in a fitted black work dress and shoes that cost more than my first car. She was petite and pretty, but that girl was powerful. She would have taken the time to sit on my lap, to kiss me, to make plans for the night. She ran her own Florida-based arm of her family’s national media conglomerate, the nonprofit she had created, and the world. But she always took the time to make sure people knew how much she loved them.
And me? She loved me a whole damn lot. But not a tenth as much as I loved her. I stood up straighter when she walked in the door. I loved to look at her across the room at a party and know that she would be leaving with me, to see her throw her head back in laughter and know that I could make her laugh like that. She had been mine to protect. And I had let her down.
Everyone told me I had to move on, that this pain and emptiness would ruin me if I didn’t get back out there. I was young. I could still have everything I wanted out of life. That was what they said. But she was what I wanted out of life.
It had gotten to the point that my mother—my own Southern, pearl-wearing, churchgoing, never-said-a-dirty-word-in-her-life mother—had said that maybe I should consider a one-night stand. That is a conversation one does not ever want to have with one’s mother.
My friends had suggested I move. This neighborhood was full of wealthy, retired snowbirds. It was too stuffy for me. But Greer had wanted to be near her family when we had children. This was her world. How could I leave it? Leaving would mean taking the clothes out of her closet, throwing the rows of shoes from their racks into boxes, removing the purses from their storage containers and giving