It comes with a trail.

What I was being handed had no trail.

No history, no warning, no prior episode, no scan, no complaint — just a healthy woman, alive on Tuesday, a body on Wednesday, and a husband who did not want anyone to look too closely at the difference.

That is not how the real thing arrives.

The real thing leaves a wake.

This left only a smooth, closed, hurried surface, and everything I am, everything three decades had made me, knew that a smooth surface arriving that fast over a death that sudden is not the absence of a story.

It is a story someone is sitting on.