I wanted to tell him I needed it now. I needed everything now. I needed a cure, a promise, a miracle, some reason to believe the man sitting across from me would still be sitting there next spring.
But Walter’s eyes were steady.
So I took the envelope and placed it in the back pocket of my winter coat, where I kept things I needed to remember but did not want to look at.
Walter died on a Sunday morning in March, fifty-nine days after he told me he was sick.
He went quietly, the way he had lived.
I was holding his hand.
The hospital room smelled faintly of lavender soap because I had brought a bar from home. Walter hated the smell of hospitals, and by then there were so few things I could still do for him that the soap felt important.
He was sixty-four years old.
I drove home by myself because I had asked everyone to leave me alone that morning. I sat in the driveway for a long time before I went inside.
The house was just a house then.
Full of thirty-one years of life.
And completely, utterly silent.
I did not sleep that night.
I sat in Walter’s chair by the window and watched the sun go down and come back up.
Denton called the next morning.
He said he was sorry.
He said he loved me.
He said he would come by Wednesday so we could go through some things together.
I said, “Okay.”
At first, I did not think much of it.
Going through things sounded normal. There was a lot to sort out. Papers. Arrangements. The service. The company. The kind of awful practical details that arrive immediately when your heart has not even accepted the loss yet.
I told myself I was reading too much into the way he said it.
Wednesday came.
Denton arrived at eleven.
Suki was with him, which I expected.
But there was a third person with them.