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.

And that they could not tell him one thing.

Not a word. Because he was not the participant, because that is not how any of it works, and because a study that handed results to husbands would not be a study.

He knew that. They told him in 2002 and he wrote again in 2003 anyway.

Eleven years running. The same four questions. Typed, on his own firm’s paper, every year.

She said: “He knew we couldn’t answer. He did it so there would be a record that somebody had asked.”

Dov and I have talked about the safe twice.

The first was in that hospital on the Friday and it did not go well at all.

Both of us said things. I said one thing to my son that I have apologized for twice and will probably apologize for again.

The second was at my table in the April and it went better, and at the end of it my son put his head down on that table like he was nine.