His fifth wave of grief began with the smell of jasmine wafting through the neighbor’s hedge when Dan was on his way to work that Monday morning. That was the day Salha arrived. 

The flowers must have been growing on the other side of the hedge, invisible from the sidewalk. Waves of scent transcended the thick greenery and caught him up in their spell. He stopped walking when he noticed the scent and looked at the leaves of the hedge. Grief had turned him into such a strange person, the kind that did things like these and did not care that the other people on the sidewalk were staring at him. He could smell the jasmine even better now, but instead of pleasure his insides split with the knowing that his heart’s pain had found a new way to torment him. This feeling had been there for a while, waiting for him to notice it so it could grip him a little harder. He wanted it to stop, he wished so hard that it would stop. Every time he’d thought the pain was starting to wane it would come back, angrier. For the first time in months, Dan missed his usual bus to work. 

At dusk, after work, he took a different bus and walked a longer route to his flat on a jasmine-free path. Salha was sitting on the bench in the street in front of his building where she’d told him she’d be waiting.

That night, after dinner, Dan and Salha lay down on his living room floor in the darkness. They’d slipped back into old rituals effortlessly, back to the places they used to go to when they were children. Dan did a parody of an old dance they both knew when he moved around turning off most of the lights in his living room to leave only the dim floor lamp in the corner. It was so that they could talk without the scrutiny of bright lights or the distraction of body language like they’d done so many times before. Years before, they’d spent countless nights curating the perfect ambience and debating whether there was such a thing as micro-expressions being too loud, or whether being able to look into people’s eyes while they spoke was helpful or frightening. This scene on the floor felt like going back to innocence, to the time before they’d known pain.

More than a year had passed since they’d last seen each other and there was so much between them that felt odd – familiar but unexplored. He, perked up by the strangeness of coming back from work to find his solitude invaded, but not minding at all. She, puzzled by his attentiveness all evening, wondering when he’d learned to care for people with an affection she associated with mothers who were not like hers—mothers who knew how to love tenderly, not the ones with razor blades stuck in their hearts by traumas nobody taught them to name, let alone heal, so you got cut whenever they held you close.

The large window in the corner was open and from where they lay they could see the moon hanging out with a handful of stars. Dan raised his head from the floor every few minutes to sip from a glass of his second-favorite dry white, a Riesling poured from a bottle he’d opened days before. On the edge of the coffee table a few feet away from her own feet, she had placed an identical wine glass with the last few sips of the Kombucha that she’d brought, and that hadn’t been in the fridge long enough to be cold. Salha imagined accidentally knocking the glass over and strewing shards and smelly odd-coloured stains on his carpet. It wouldn’t be the first time that things shattered while they watched. 

“I got my second pay raise in 6 months today.” 

Dan rarely talked about the job he barely liked but was incredibly good at.

“Ah, much better than unpaid leave!”

She had spent the last two months travelling rather aimlessly, filling her days with park walks and visits to bookstores and tiny independent galleries. She’d allowed herself to get lost and not think about the end of this trip when she’d have to go back to their home country and face the decision to move her mother, who was falling more often and forgetting things, into the tiny extra bedroom room in the flat Salha had only recently bought.

Something about imagining Salha in her little dresses in galleries, face lit up in awe, made Dan think of the jasmine in the hedge and it brought back that horrid tingling he’d felt in the morning. Through the window, the moon was now peeking between two clouds, teasing the two them, willing them to go outside and play again. The last time Dan had spent time with Salha and the others in their old friend group, before everything that happened on the night of the accident, nobody had noticed the night sky. 

All night he wondered how to bring it up, how to take them both back there so he didn’t have to feel so alone in his grief. 

“Do you still think about that night?”

He was afraid of what she might say and what the words might do to him, but he had to ask.

She moved without answering him, so he turned from the window and the moon to look at her. She got up and went to him. She sat behind his head and pushed him up by his shoulder until he was sitting. Then she got close and held him. 

They stayed that way for a long time. He, eyes closed, feeling her wrapped around his back, her arms trapping his own. She, cheek against his back, tears streaming silently.

The moon stopped its games and vanished behind the clouds.

Of course, she still thought about that night. The four of them in the car, headed back into the city from an old school friend’s wedding. Dan was driving, and his wife (now ex-wife) Pat sat in the passenger seat next to him, fifteen weeks pregnant, thrilled to be feeling good, finally, after a horrid first trimester. Salha sat with Dan’s brother Jack in the back of the car.

Dan had told Salha during their friend’s wedding that he and Pat had been tearing at each other for months before the pregnancy and that the baby was going to save them. She wasn’t sure if he meant that it would save their marriage or their lives, but for all the years she had know him, Dan had wanted nothing more than to be a father. It made Salha wonder if her own mother had ever wanted to be a mother. 

Then, somewhere in the jumble and lull of conversation and old music playing from the car’s speakers, they all heard Pat giggle and say, What if the baby were to be Jack’s?

Dan braked and veered so hard that it took many long seconds of violently bumping off the road for the car to finally stop. The headlights had gone off, and the moon was away that night, so it was really dark—and for a moment, really quiet.

Then a frightful, desperate sound tore through the silence. It was Pat’s scream.

Nobody remembers the details of the next few minutes. Which car doors flew open first? Whose phone’s torchlight was being held over Pat? All they knew was that once they could see, there was blood all over Pat’s dress, all over the passenger seat beneath her, and more blood coming every second.

Dan and Pat had only found out days before that the baby was a girl and picked the name Ivy. Pat hadn’t stopped bringing flowers into their home from the day she had become pregnant, even before she knew that she was. Ceramic mugs and glass jars filled with baby’s breath and jasmine were on every window sill, every side table every surface of their home like she was trying to mask the stink of their dead love with the symbols of budding life.

They could not have known that help would not arrive until Pat was unconscious and Ivy was gone.

Now, as Dan sat on his floor and Salha held him, he saw little jasmine petals clutched between tiny baby fingers, baby scents intermingling with floral scents, haunting everything. This way of seeing Ivy was new, unlike all the other nightmares he’d had relentlessly for the past year. It cracked him open, and his sobs shook through the arms that held him. His grief held him too, but he was no longer alone.

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