The morning my life changed was no different than any other.

I woke. I showered. The tie I chose wasn’t much different than the other ties in the drawer, and the suit I put on wasn’t much bluer than my other blue suit. It wasn’t my favorite or my most hated. It fit the same as every suit I’d had made after I got married. Bigger in the shoulders. Smaller in the waist. Sleeves more generous at the bicep. She liked when I worked out, so I did.
The morning everything changed, I felt the same as I always felt, more or less. I had plenty to do, but not too much. She was probably already in a meeting with our other editorial director. I was heading for a sheer drop into death at a hundred miles an hour while I looked up at the clouds.

The morning my life changed, I started a grocery list for the housekeeper.

The loft was bathed in light, trapezoids of sun cast over the hardwood. Twenty floors beneath me, the capillary of Crosby Street coursed the blood of steel and noise on its way to the artery of Lafayette.

My life changed on a weekday, with the gurgling of the coffeepot behind me, my jacket slung over the barstool, and the milk souring on the counter.


I put it away, because she never did. 


I had no sense of impending doom. No gut feeling that that day was different from any other. It’s unreasonable to expect I would. In an age of science and reason, why should I sense disaster before it arrived?


Yet I didn’t see it coming.

Her handwriting—flowery, curlicued, an expansive rendering of Catholic School standards—was at the bottom of a typewritten note.
I poured my coffee, assuming it was a deal memo waiting for my signature to go next to hers.

I was wrong.

It was the first time I was wrong about her intentions, but not the last.