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.

A man of seventy-six, three days off the end, signing the papers that made certain a thing he had set up in 2002 would go on working for twenty years after he was gone.
PART 4

Now mine.

They will write to you every year. The letter comes in February. It looks like nothing. Don’t put it in the bin.

Eleven letters came to that house between the February of 2015 and the February of this year.

I threw away every single one of them.

Not angrily. Not deliberately. I did not sit down and decide to ignore my husband’s instruction.

I binned them the way anybody bins anything that arrives in a window envelope from an organization they have never heard of.

Picked it off the mat. Looked at the front. In the recycling box on the back step before I had got to the kitchen.

And here is the part that I have had to say out loud to a woman in an office on Tuesdays before I could write it down.