At eighty my stomach grew so large my family got frightened. The scan found something — and then a twelve-year-old record with my late husband’s name on it, and a folder called PROJECT AGNES.

Dr. Kastellis brought me a copy of it and put it on my own kitchen table and let me look at it for as long as I wanted.

Rutger told me it was the paperwork for the firm’s health scheme and I signed it standing up at the kitchen counter without reading a word of it, because he was my husband and because he did the paperwork.

That is the only thing my husband actually did wrong in twelve years of any of this.

He let his wife sign four pages she had not read.

And then in the October of 2014, three days before he died, he had Evanthia Kastellis come onto a ward with a silver case —

to put her signature on the papers that kept it funded after he was gone.

That is what had him upset in that bed with the curtain round.

Not a guilty secret. Not something he was confessing.