What I could not stop seeing was the twenty minutes.

A man was dying on the floor of that apartment, and the person beside him — the person he had chosen, the person whose praise he preferred to his own family — looked at his failing body and calculated, first, how to protect herself.

She spent his dwindling minutes deleting messages and hiding bottles and arranging his clothes into an alibi.

She weighed his life against her secret, and for twenty minutes the secret won.

And the thing that struck me, standing at that hospital bed, was that Roland had traded a wife who read his labs at three in the morning and stopped a surgeon from killing him, for a woman who would let him die on a rug rather than be found out.