Whenever I asked what they had discussed, he would only squeeze my hand and smile and say, “There’s something I need to arrange.” And then, gently: “Please trust me.”

We had always told each other everything.

In three years of marriage and in the terrible months of his illness, there had been no locked doors between us, nothing he held back, nothing I did not know.

So the sudden privacy was strange, and a little painful, and I will admit that a selfish part of me wanted to press him, to insist, to be let into whatever this was — because being shut out, even a little, even by a dying husband arranging something, hurt in a way I did not want to name.

But he was so quietly firm about it, so unlike his usual open self, that I understood it mattered to him, and I made myself let it go.

I let him have his privacy.