I turned off the lights.

I sat on the floor of my dead wife’s shop in the dark with her apron against my face, and for the first time since July I let myself think the thought I had been holding off with work and tea and other people’s hems, which was that I did not know how to do this, any of it, the shop or the grief or the rest of a life without her, and that I was seventy years old and tired and perhaps the sensible people had been right and I should never have opened the door at all.

I don’t know how long I sat there.

I know that at some point there was a knocking, soft and then not soft, and Yusuf’s voice through the glass saying, “Mr.