My Husband Made His Doctor Promise to Give Me an Envelope Only After He Was Gone

I looked at my husband’s handwriting again, my name in his uneven letters, and just like that I was not in the hallway anymore.

I was back on our porch, two months earlier, in the last good light, and Mark was laughing about baby names, defending Clementine with a straight face, and Cecelia was kicking beneath my shirt, and the two of us were planning a future we still believed we had all the time in the world to live.

None of us had known how fast the remaining days would go — how a span that sounds so short as three months can still, from inside it, feel endless right up until it ends.

I stood in that hallway holding the envelope, suspended between the porch and the present, between the life we had planned and the one I was now going to have to live, and I understood that whatever was inside would be the last bridge between the two.

I did not open it there.

But I did not put it down, either.