“Baby, you home?” There’s no answer and Wendy doesn’t expect one. She’s always home before Irene.

She chucks her keys in the fishbowl and starts to sort through the mail absentmindedly. It’s been a long week at work and all she wants to do is curl up with a good book and her girlfriend, and then sleep for the entire weekend.

She usually receives three types of mail: bills, bank statements, and a lot of love letters. Give that she’s been in a committed relationship for about a year, you’d think that people would have given up by now. But every once in a while a cringey confession makes its way into her hands and then into the trash. Or onto the fridge, if Wendy finds it funny enough.

Today there’s something different. There’s a folded up piece of paper with red ink bleeding through. Wendy doesn’t open it.

Instead, she takes it to to the bathroom and turns on the lights, ignoring how pale she looks in the mirror. She’s always been pale, but this is the first time her paleness has a sickly tinge to it.

Underneath the sink, beneath bottles of unopened shampoo and conditioners, there’s a tin. She carefully stacks the bottles aside, making sure to keep them in the same formation, and retrieves the tin. It rattles when she picks it up and she blinks slowly in surprise. Usually, its emptied out when she’s done with it.

She upends it over the trash. The ashes fall like dark cherry blossoms and she resists the urge to catch them betwee