It’s been okay. In some ways it isn’t too different from how it was before. It’s not like I went out all that much anyway. I worked from home. I didn’t have all that many friends. My parents are dead, well, I suppose you knew that. Angie and I mostly watched movies. After the initial, you know, disruption, Angie just sort of settled down into her old routine. I thought maybe she might sell the house, but then, why would she? It’s all paid off, we’d put all that work into it. I heard her on the phone with her mother: she said, it’s full of good memories. And one pretty bad one, I thought to myself, but I can see her point. You can’t let the downer moments overwhelm everything. I did have to be kind of sneakyish, though. At the beginning I’d get bored and I’d turn on the TV sometimes when she was sleeping, but it didn’t seem like I could ever get the volume low enough and it’d wake her up and she’d come out into the living room and turn it off again. It didn’t freak her out, though, because— Okay, this is sort of dopey stuff, but you know Roku? We’d run the streaming service through a Roku stick, right? It’s a little thing you plug into your TV to get Netflix and Disney and stuff. But we also have an old PS3, a Playstation 3, and because I have a lot of physical media, DVDs and Blu-rays, we’d use that to play the discs. But at one point one of the PS3 controllers broke and I bought this off-brand version, not a genuine Sony one, right? Bear with me. What happens is that there’s some kind of electronic interference between the Roku stick and the Playstation. Don’t ask me the details, I was never able to figure it out. But this off-brand controller has some kind of life of its own. Not literally, no. But if we turn the TV off sometimes, or the PS3 sometimes, the controller just beeps and turns everything on again. I tried resetting all the things, Googling the problem, never could figure it out. But my point is that Angie seeing the TV turn itself on like that wasn’t anything unusual. It’s annoying, but it’s not scary, right? It’s not like a ghost is doing it.
         Except this time a ghost was doing it, said Death.
         Yeah, said Bob. And that’s what kind of started bumming me out. I could manipulate this and that, you know how it is, little things like remote control buttons, or maybe I flip through a book. But no matter how bored I got I didn’t like to, especially when she was home. Because every little thing I did, at best it’s an annoyance, right? Or like something puzzling. At worst I could legit scare her, and I never wanted to do that.
         Of course not, said Death.
         And then, Bob went on, I started wondering if there was something about me that was preventing her from moving on.
         Preventing her from moving on.
         Yeah. She didn’t seem to do much any more, even compared to how we were. She goes to work, but I don’t see her going out with friends. She calls her mom, but that’s it. So I start to wonder, is it because I’m hanging around still? I don’t think she knows I’m there, but maybe she feels it somehow, and that’s what’s keeping her from going on with her life.
         It doesn’t work like that, said Death. It’s just grief.
         Just grief.
         Well, I suppose you see a lot of that.
         Death nodded.
         Anyway, whatever it is, I don’t seem to be doing much good around here any more. So I’m pretty glad you dropped by, to be honest.
         Time to go, then?
         Yeah, thanks, man.
         Death escorted Bob away, then returned to the house to wait for Angie, who would be home soon, after she’d stopped by the pharmacy.
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