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.

Eleven years. Eleven Februaries. Eleven envelopes off the same mat.

And the entire time, upstairs in a bedside drawer — about eleven feet, as the crow flies, from the mat those letters were landing on —

there was a cream envelope in my husband’s own handwriting with four lines in it telling me exactly what they were and exactly what to do about them.

I did not open it because I had promised not to, and because nothing had happened that I could not explain.

That is the sentence that finishes me, and I want to set it down properly rather than let somebody else summarize it.

Unless something happens that you can’t explain.

In the spring of 2019 my left knee went and I could not get up those stairs for a fortnight.

I explained that one in about four seconds. I was seventy-three.

In 2021 I lost about four kilograms without doing anything at all about it.