Every time the telephone rang, to Roman, it felt like a physical violation.

It was too shrill, a digital trespass into the curated stillness of his waiting. He let it ring, the electronic warble drilling into the quiet.

Roman stared at the device on the kitchen wall. They had kept the landline only because Samara's mother believed cell towers were slowly microwaving the population's frontal lobes, ("They steal your thoughts, Roman," she had whispered once) and now, it served as a dedicated hotline for only two types of people: scammers offering to extend his car warranty, and Samara's sister, Catherine.

He knew the cadence of the ring. He knew the specific number of pulses—four, five, six—before the answering machine would engage. He let it ring as he stood there, a man under siege in his own kitchen, waiting for the technology to intervene.

The machine picked up with a click. His own voice, recorded months ago, filled the room: a cheerful, competent-sounding stranger inviting the caller to leave a message. It was a recording from a time when 'leaving a message' meant "we are out at dinner," not "one of us is dead and the other is staring at a coffee grinder."

Then came the beep. Then came Catherine.

"Roman? Hi, it's Cat. Just calling to see how you are. I know it's... well, I know. Give me a ring when you get a chance. We're thinking of you."

Thinking of you.

Thinking of you?

The phrase was an irritant, a piece of conversational grit that lodged in his eye. Roman glared at the answering machine as the tape hissed into silence.

What, precisely, was she thinking? Was she picturing him as he was now, standing in a darkening room wearing a coat indoors, holding a cold cup of coffee? Was she performing a mental calculation of his presumed sorrow, adjusting the variables based on how many weeks had passed? Let's see, seven months multiplied by widowhood, minus the holidays... yes, he should be sad, but functional.

Her concern felt proprietary. It felt as if his grief were a piece of family property she was now obliged to manage, like a vacation home in a swamp that nobody wanted to visit but everyone had to pay taxes on.

He thought of her at the funeral. Catherine had been swathed in expensive, architectural black, her face a mask of dignified sorrow so perfect it looked like she had rehearsed it in a mirror. She had cornered him by the buffet, holding his arm in a grip of surprising strength—the grip of a woman who played tennis competitively—and whispered, "She wouldn't want you to fall apart, Roman."

The effrontery of it still astonished him. To be instructed on the desires of the dead. To be given performance notes on the correct presentation of his own bereavement. Less weeping, Roman. More stoicism. Shoulders back. Project to the back of the room.

Who was she to know what Samara would or would not have wanted? Had Catherine been there for the late-night terrors? Had she been there for the quiet, desperate negotiations with hospital schedulers, or the brutal intimacy of watching a body betray the person within it?

No. Catherine had sent artisanal fruit baskets. Catherine had sent pears wrapped in gold foil that required a specific, specialized knife to consume and tasted faintly of cardboard. Catherine had called at convenient hours to say she was "thinking of him."

The anger he had felt toward the coffee grinder earlier had been a clean, focused thing. It was a dispute between a man and a machine. It was physics. This was different. This was a messy, sprawling rage directed at the living. It was directed at their platitudes, their sympathetic head-tilts, their absolute, infuriating inability to understand that his loss was not a shareable commodity.

It was a closed system.

Thermodynamics forbade the transfer of this specific heat.

Roman stood up. The chair scraped against the floor.

He walked to the kitchen sink and poured Samara's now-cold coffee down the drain. The brown liquid swirled into a vortex and vanished. It felt like a necessary violence. A rejection of the sacrament.

He turned to the counter. The bag of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe sat there, open, innocent, smelling of citrus and lies.

Roman grabbed the bag. He walked to the back door, unlocked it, and stepped out into the biting November wind.

The garden was dark, illuminated only by the light spilling from the kitchen window. The rose bushes he had hacked at earlier stood like jagged silhouettes against the fence.

"Here," Roman said to the night.

He upended the bag and emptied the entire contents—twenty-four dollars' worth of premium, single-origin coffee—into the dormant winter mulch of Samara's rose garden.

The light, glossy beans scattered across the dark earth like discarded jewels. They bounced off the frozen mud. They settled around the roots of the traumatized bushes. It was a desecration, certainly. It was a waste of resources that would have appalled the economists. But it was also a relief so profound it made his knees weak.

He would not drink her coffee. He would not participate in this posthumous pantomime any longer. He would not be the man they were thinking of.

The anger was a reclamation. It was the first decision he had made for himself, and not for the archive of her, in seven months.

He stood there for a moment, breathing in the cold air, watching a squirrel cautiously descend from the fence to investigate the windfall of caffeine.

"Go ahead," Roman told the squirrel. "It has notes of blueberry and jasmine. You'll hate it."

word count: 5125