When Jack awoke he had only the briefest of thoughts before he fell into the hole.

The hole was in the middle of him somewhere. Sometimes it was where his heart used to be and sometimes it moved to his belly, where it churned like a mixer in raw dough.

Her name came to him. Sarah. And the hole expanded to encompass all of him. He was falling without center, turning and tumbling in a limitless expanse. There was pain, to be sure, and remorse and hopelessness all rolled into a spiraling emptiness that was in the unending act of swallowing him whole.

He ignored the anger that hid behind the guilt until he heard the baby wake up and begin to cry. Then the flash of anger burst incandescent and he closed his eyes until it passed. He drew a long shuddering breath and the hole shrank until it was just an ache in his chest that he could almost manage.

He got out of bed and pulled on a pair of undershorts. The elastic band snapped against the taut tanned skin as he moved to the bassinet that occupied one corner of the plain grey room. His huge callused hands smoothed the tiny brow and as he gazed at his daughter and smiled, the hole within him almost disappeared.

He carried her out of the bedroom and into the kitchen where his feet unconsciously tried to avoid the cracks in the linoleum floor. The hole seized this small opportunity and tried to take him over again, tried to convince him that if he’d just taken the time to put down new linoleum that Sarah would still be here. But he knew this to be a lie, which pointed at a deeper and darker truth.

“Early to bed, early to rise, and your girl goes out with other guys.” It was an old saw, one that he’d laughed at as a boy. It didn’t seem quite so funny now.

“The early bird gets the worm,” he laughed humorlessly to himself as his daughter nestled in an orange blanket against the inadequate flat planes of his wide chest. She stopped her fussing as he watched her nurse from the bottle. After a time she let the nipple pop out of her mouth and sighed, a deep sigh of contentment that he openly envied.

Jack changed her diaper and then she wanted to eat again. He supposed, as he watched her face in the pale grey light, that she had his broad forehead and wide nose. It was too soon to tell about her eyes. But she definitely had her mother’s mouth, full and soft and shaped like a heart. He felt a rush of shame as he thought of her mother’s mouth, sucking just like this tiny daughter, but even more insistently and with a hunger that was never entirely satisfied. But the total concentration, the primal need, they were exactly the same.