He slept with the door locked. The cat was outside meowing, but the baby was outside gurgling too and Grant hid his head under his pillows all night. *** At work, Sarah told him that he looked like hell. Jorge said he just needed a break, maybe take a vacation and tinker around his new place, clear his head. Grant managed one-syllable responses to everyone.After work, he went by the church. The minister lived in the house next door with his wife and three daughters. Grant had been by their house a lot when he and Donna had still been trying to make it work, but tonight he found their doorway dark and forbidding, even as the door cracked open to spill warm light onto him. Miranda informed him her husband wasn’t home yet but Jerry could call him later. Grant thanked her, went back to his car with a smile plastered on his face, and sat behind the wheel, wondering if he should kill himself yet.

He called his therapist.

Forty minutes later, Grant had accepted that this was just a projection of his own fear of family, exacerbated by the separation. If he went home and embraced his own fears, he’d be free of his delusion. Also, the therapist had kindly called in a prescription for him.

He stopped by the drugstore on Tenth. He poked at toothbrushes while he waited for his prescription to be filled and bought a soda when he checked out.

He swallowed the first med in the car, washing it down with his soda. The drugstore shared a parking lot with a pizza place and a store with crystals and plastic dreamcatchers in the front window. He sipped his soda and watched the neon sign of the pizza place until he felt a little better.

When he stepped through his front door, he repeated what his therapist had told him to say: “I accept my own fears. I am not my father.”

The baby wasn’t in the living room or in his office. He let out the breath he’d been holding.

In his kitchen, he prepared a celebratory meal of hamburgers broiled in his own oven, though he burned the fries. He took the food to his living room, put in a Clash CD, and started to eat.

The baby wailed.

Shaking, Grant set the food down and dragged himself to the office. The baby thrashed on the floor, face pink and scrunched tight as it screamed.

“I accept you,” he croaked. No response. The radio was too loud, and he went back to the living room to turn it down.

The baby stopped crying.

He turned it back on. More wailing. He ejected the CD. This isn’t real. This isn’t real. He put in Bob Marley. The baby stopped crying and started gurgling.

*** “Missed you on Sunday,” said Jerry, sipping his coffee. In the other room, Grant heard Miranda get the girls ready for bed. Miranda’s day job was as an accountant, and she’d been at work through most of the last months of Grant and Donna’s marriage. Having her here now was just another reminder of how the world had changed so much in such a short time.”Settling into the new place.”

“I understand. If you need anything, you’ll let me know.” Jerry was a good guy. He’d come to their church two years ago, and right away struck that perfect balance between friend and pastor. Grant liked him, and he trusted him.

“That’s why I’m here.”

“I figured,” said Jerry, smiling around his cup.

“What do you know about ghosts?”

Jerry lost his smile.

*** Grant spent two hours on the phone with his therapist this time. Jerry had gently and firmly insisted.The baby cried when Grant put on Beethoven, but again, Marley saved the evening. “I accept you,” said Grant. “I accept you. I accept you.”

Mandy sprawled next to the baby and attempted to groom him.

“I accept you.”