I had not been able to bring myself to change it.

His reading glasses still rested beside the lamp where he had left them.

An unfinished crossword puzzle still sat inside the top drawer of his desk, a few squares filled in his small careful hand, waiting for a man who was not coming back to finish it.

That room was, more than any other place on earth, where I still felt Henry, where I went to sit when the grief was bad, where forty-six years of marriage still seemed to hang in the air like the smell of his pipe.

Michael knew precisely what that room meant to me.