Hale paused at the door.
“He had eighteen months from his diagnosis to the end,” he said.
“He spent most of it making sure the people he loved would find their way to each other after he was gone.” A small pause.
“He was a very deliberate man.”
The door closed softly behind him.
He arrived two days later.
I heard the car first — tires on gravel, engine cutting off abruptly, a door closing with more force than necessary.
I was in the kitchen.
I set down my cup and walked to the front door before he knocked.
He was tall.
Dark hair going grey at the temples.
Thomas’s jaw, unmistakably.
Thomas’s eyes too, though where Thomas’s eyes had always been warm, Daniel’s were guarded and flat.
“You’re her,” he said.
Not a greeting.
“I’m Eleanor,” I said.
“Please come in.”
He stepped inside but didn’t go far.
He stood in the entryway with his coat still on, looking around the room the way someone does when they’re cataloguing rather than seeing.
“Nice place,” he said.
His tone made it something else entirely.
“Can I make you tea?”
“I don’t want tea.” He turned to face me.
“I want to understand what happened.
My father was dying and he married a woman he hadn’t spoken to in fifty-five years.
I’d like to know why.”
“So would I,” I said.
“Fully.”
That stopped him slightly.
He’d expected defense, I think.
He recalibrated.
“You were his nurse,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And you recognized him.”
“Yes.”
“And within — what — a few weeks, you were married.”
“About six weeks from the day I walked into his room, yes.”
His jaw tightened.
“He was dying.
He was on medication.
He wasn’t—” He stopped himself.
