Chapter 15: The Grief
Saturday, September 2, Woods Hole Cemetery, Morning
Saturday brought cold rain and dense fog that made September on Cape Cod feel like November. The ocean was invisible beyond the cemetery fence, but Ted could hear it, waves against rocks, rhythmic and indifferent. The foghorn moaned every thirty seconds from the lighthouse, a sound that had always meant home to Anya.
The cemetery held maybe thirty mourners. Colleagues from MIT and Invita, a few distant relatives from California, friends from Woods Hole. Thirty people to mark the end of a brilliant life cut short at fifty.
He stood at the graveside, rain soaking through his suit jacket. The casket was simple, dark wood, already wet. Water dripped from his hair down his neck, cold and constant. His shoes sank slightly into mud with each small shift of weight. He’d prepared remarks. Lost them somewhere between the car and here.
“I married Anya right here, in Woods Hole, twenty years ago.” His voice sounded wrong, too steady. “A conference on neural networks. We ended up on the beach after the last session, arguing about consciousness. She insisted it was just computation. I said there had to be something more. We argued until sunrise then called some friends and got married on the beach.”
The fog horn sounded. He waited for it to fade.
“She was fierce about it. Told me I was being mystical, that I was confusing poetry with science. But around four AM, she admitted maybe there was something beautiful in not knowing. In the mystery being bigger than our theories.”
He looked at the faces watching him. Imani’s eyes red. Koch staring at the ground. Susan standing apart, perfectly composed.
“That was when I knew. Not that I’d win the argument. I never did. But that I wanted to spend my life losing arguments to her.”
Someone laughed softly. Others smiled. Anya would have liked that.
“She was brilliant. She changed how we understand the mind, how we think about consciousness itself. But what I’ll remember is how she hummed while cooking. Always off-key. Always the same song, something Russian her grandmother taught her. How she’d grab my hand during scary movies even though she claimed not to be scared. Her terrible quantum physics jokes at two AM when we couldn’t sleep.”
His throat tightened. He pushed through.
“Even in her final days, she was teaching me. Showing me patterns I’d missed, connections I’d overlooked. That was Anya. She never stopped looking, never stopped questioning, never stopped pushing everyone around her to think harder and reach further.”
The rain intensified. No one moved.
His voice broke. He stopped trying to control it.
“She lives on in how we think, how we work, how we love. That’s her true immortality.”
They lowered the casket. The fog horn sounded again. Ted threw the first shovel of wet earth, hearing it hit wood with a hollow thud that would stay with him forever.
No one left until each had placed their shovel of earth. A final connection. A final goodbye.
Susan Perkins approached first. Her composure was perfect, her expression carefully calibrated between professional and personal.
“She had a great mind, Ted. The world will miss her.” She leaned in, gave him a brief hug, then stepped back. “Take the time you need. Your position will be there when you’re ready.”
She walked away, heels sinking slightly in wet grass. Ted nodded, unable to form words. The condolence was sincere but Susan was already thinking ahead, already calculating next steps. That was her nature. He couldn’t fault her for it.
Koch came next. Ted extended his hand but Daniel wrapped his arms around him, pulled him close. Whispered in his ear. “She was special, Ted. Saw things nobody else could. Make her proud.”
He stepped back, glanced at Anya’s grave, then walked off wiping his eyes. For thirty years Ted had hated Koch for what he’d tried to do to them. But grief strips pretense. What remained looked more like respect.
The mourners dispersed slowly, everyone murmuring condolences Ted couldn’t quite hear over the fog horn and the rain and the ocean that never stopped.
Imani was the last to approach. She pulled him into a hug without speaking. They stood there in the rain, the two remaining points of a triangle that had lost its apex. She held him tightly. He held her back. Both grieving the same brilliant, impossible woman who had bound them together.
When she finally pulled back, her eyes held something more than grief. Questions, maybe. Suspicion. The overnight vitals. The timing. The unauthorized scan he thought she hadn’t known about. But not here. Not now.
She touched his shoulder. Kissed his cheek. “Call me if you need anything. And even if you don’t.”
Then she was gone too, and he was alone with the groundskeeper waiting to finish filling the grave.
Ted walked back to his car through fog so thick he could barely see the path.
Back in Cambridge, Ted stood frozen in his own doorway.
The house was too quiet. Too still. Too empty in a way that felt permanent.
He stepped inside. Closed the door. The sound of it latching echoed wrong.
Her coffee cup sat by the sink. Lipstick mark on the rim, coral pink, the color she always wore. He’d meant to wash it before the funeral. Couldn’t make himself touch it. It sat there now like an artifact, the last thing her lips had touched in this house.
Her reading glasses on the counter. Folded but slightly crooked the way she always left them. A hair tie beside them.
He moved through the kitchen to the living room. The Martin guitar rested silently in its stand. He stopped in front of it. Reached out. His fingers hovered over the strings. He could play something. Should. Her favorite song, maybe. That old Russian melody she hummed while cooking.
His hand dropped. He couldn’t. Not yet. The strings would sound wrong without her there to hear them.
The couch still held the indentation where she’d sat reading papers, feet tucked under her. The table held her notebook, the one she’d been writing in at the hospital. He’d brought it home after. Couldn’t open it yet.
He made coffee out of habit. Poured it. Couldn’t drink it. Set it beside hers by the sink. Two cups now. Both cold.
He opened his laptop at the kitchen table. The processed data sat on his drives. Anya’s cerebral architecture waiting. He could pull up the visualizations. See her neural signatures, the flow diagrams of her reasoning, the structures that made her thoughts uniquely hers.
All of it preserved. All of it lifeless. Information without animation. Patterns without purpose. He couldn’t look at it. Not today. Maybe not for weeks.
The laptop screen reflected his face, unshaven, hollow-eyed. When had he last eaten? Thursday maybe. Before the funeral. Days ago.
He closed the laptop. Sat staring at nothing.
The refrigerator hummed. The clock ticked. Outside, traffic passed. Normal Saturday evening sounds in Cambridge. The world continuing as if nothing had changed.
Hours passed. The light faded. He didn’t turn on lamps. Just sat in gathering darkness, still in his wet funeral suit, still at the kitchen table. He should eat. Should shower. Should do something other than sit here. But movement required decision, and decision required caring about outcomes, and he couldn’t quite reach that level of engagement with his own existence.
Eventually exhaustion pulled him under. He slumped forward, head on his arms, still sitting in the chair. Sleep took him mercifully, dreamlessly.
Sunday morning, his laptop beeped.
The sound pulled him from sleep. His neck ached. His suit was still damp. Sunlight streamed through the kitchen window, the first sun in days.
The laptop screen showed a notification. New email.
He blinked, tried to focus. The sender name resolved.
Anya Chikacheva.
His breath caught. Impossible. Spam? Some cruel bot harvesting her address? A forgotten auto-response from before she died? His hand trembled as he moved the cursor, afraid to click, afraid not to.
He clicked it open.
The email contained a photo. Vancouver, twenty years ago. Their first conference together. Both of them young, grinning on rocky shores, wind in their hair. Already in love though neither had said it yet. The beginning of everything.
Above the image, a single line:
“Remember but don’t hold on. I am part of you.”
Ted smiled through sudden tears. Then noticed the asterisk.
Below, in smaller text:
“Wipe your tears. Take a shower. Get off your ass and finish our work.”
The laugh erupted from somewhere deep, mixing with sobs until he couldn’t tell which was which. Of course she’d known. Known he’d sit paralyzed. Known exactly when to reach through death itself and shove him forward.
Scheduled send. She’d written this after they went to the park. Before she stopped being able to write at all. Timed it for exactly this moment.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said to the empty room.
He stood. His body protested, stiff, hungry, exhausted. He walked to the bathroom. Turned on the shower. Let the water run hot while he stripped off the funeral suit.
In the mirror, he barely recognized himself. But behind the exhaustion, something else now. Purpose. Permission.
She’d given him one last gift. One last command.
Finish the work.