I hadn’t planned to tell him like that, in a concrete parking structure with an engine running, but it came out of me, I’m late, Niko, I think it’s real this time, and I watched the far look leave his face all at once and the whole of him come back into his eyes and land on me, present, entirely there.

He put his hand flat on my stomach where there was nothing yet to feel and he said, “Then I’ll be careful.

I promise you I’ll be careful this time.” And he meant it.

I know he meant it.

Careful is just not a thing his work allowed, in the end, and I have had to learn to hold both of those truths at once — that he promised, and that he could not keep it, and that neither of those cancels the other.

That was the last thing my husband ever said to me. I’ll be careful. And then he kissed me, and shouldered his bag, and walked toward the stairwell, and turned once at the door the way he always did, and lifted his hand, and was gone.