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.

For about four years after Rutger died, I could not open post with his name near it.

Anything that looked like it had come out of his working life went straight in.

Renewals. Statements. Anything from a firm with a name I half recognized. Anything with a reference number on the front.

Not one of those envelopes got opened in this house between the November of 2014 and about the summer of 2018.

I am not going to dress that up as something better than it was.

I was seventy going on seventy-one, I had been married to that man for fifty years and two months, and I could not lift the flap on an envelope with his world inside it.

That is all of it. That is the whole reason.

And a letter from Kastellis Biomedical, in a window envelope, with a reference number on it, looks exactly like the four hundred other things I was binning.