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drifting into the past. Most days anyway. Other days it didn’t matter how loud he turned up the volume, he couldn’t seem to drown out the voices in his head. His own voice reliving the past, doctor’s voices, Darla’s voice... He’d hear her telling him about a fundraiser she was in charge of, or a conversation they’d had about a vacation they were planning. It was never anything important, just endless chatter that reminded him she was still there and not going to fade away anytime soon.
    Grief wasn’t a good companion. It kept you up at night, drained you until your body ached and took and took without ever giving anything back in return. JD knew this, but that didn’t stop him from getting lost in it every day. The feelings that grief caused him were like old friends. Anger held his hand in the mornings, sorrow kept him company in the afternoon, and loneliness rocked him in its arms at night.
     
    * * *
    Lauren couldn’t sleep—she’d been too anxious to tackle her growing to-do list—so she decided to drive into town early that morning and stock up on supplies. She noticed that Marsh had ventured out from under the bed to use the litter box some time during the night, so that was good.
    When she returned from running her errands, Lauren decided to start inside and clean the cottage from top to bottom. After putting the groceries away, she started a load of laundry, swept out the kitchen and cleaned all the windows. It didn’t take long before the tables shone with furniture polish and every speck of dust was banished.
    Tomorrow, w ith all of the cleaning done inside the cottage, she’d finally be able to explore the refuge. Even though it was the slow season, there would still be some year-round residents such as American coots, ring-necked pheasants and wood ducks.
    After everything was sparkling, Lauren worked all afternoon sorting through her aunt’s clothes, books and knickknacks. In her will, Aunt Cora requested that Lauren donate to charity whatever she didn’t want, so Lauren boxed up what she didn’t need or want to keep and loaded it into her car to take into town later. For a woman in her seventies, Aunt Cora hadn’t collected much over the years. Her collection of books and field guides took up the bulk of her belongings. Lauren kept the books because she’d need some reading material anyway, especially if she was going to survive an entire summer without cable. She could easily spring for a satellite, but there was too much she wanted to do outside besides sit indoors glued to a TV screen. It would take days just to explore all the trails around the property and her binoculars would provide more entertainment than a TV ever could.
    Lauren started a new life list of all the birds she saw around the cottage. She jotted down the name of the Anna’s hummingbird she saw sipping at the feeder in the window and the common yellowthroat eating a grasshopper out in the yard.
    That afternoon, w hen the phone rang, Lauren nearly jumped out of her skin. The ringer sounded out of place in a place where the sounds of nature dominated. Her mother’s clinical voice snapped her from her birdwatching euphoria. Alicia Bennett barely said hello before she started questioning her daughter’s choices.
    “ Mom, I’m not running away,” Lauren insisted. “We’ve gone over this a million times.”
    “Then what do you call moving to a cottage in the middle of nowhere?”
    “I call it paradise. The bird activity is incredible here.” She proceeded to describe all the birds she’d seen since arriving and rattled off the names already on her life list. She knew her mother couldn’t care less if she’d seen four different types of sparrows since arriving, but she told her about it anyway, just to annoy her.
    “Lauren, you need to face reality. Traipsing around the swamplands isn’t going to do you any good.”
    Quite the contrary. Being near the refuge was exactly what Lauren needed. This was reality. It