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.

He keeps coming back to the fact that he should have asked me in 2014.

And I keep telling him the same thing, which is that I had a letter in a drawer for twelve years that would have answered every single question he had —

and that I did not open that either.

We are about even, he and I. That is where we have landed and it is the only place we were ever going to land.

Soraya rings on Wednesdays and on Sundays now.

That is new since February. She has not explained it and I have not asked her about it and I am not going to.

The letter from February this year — the twelfth one, the one that came while I could not do up my trousers — did not go in the bin.

Dov found it in the recycling box on the back step when he went to the house for the envelope.