I had been in that bedroom, in the chair beside his hospice bed, day and night, holding his hand, nowhere near a notary public or a lawyer’s office or any official who could have watched me sign a document and sworn to it.

And yet here was an official seal certifying that I had done exactly that, on a day when I was keeping vigil over a dying man.

I want to be precise about what that date meant, because its cruelty took a moment to fully land on me even as I sat there.

In the week that stamp claimed I had sat before a notary and signed away control of my life, I had in fact been doing the opposite of conducting legal business — I had been holding my husband’s hand as he died, counting his breaths, sleeping in the chair, living inside the longest and most sacred week of my life.

Shirley had chosen, as the fictional date of my supposed surrender, the very days I was losing Lawrence.