That is why he was so competent, so caring, so quick to take every burden from my hands in those first hours.

It looked like a brother’s love, a family rallying around a widow in shock.

It was, in fact, a man exploiting the specific cognitive incapacity of grief to move a living body quickly to a friendly funeral home before anyone in a clear state of mind could look at it.

Every kindness he performed in those first hours, the handling of details, the sparing me of decisions, the gentle management of everything, was in service of keeping me too grief-stricken and too grateful to ask the questions that would have unraveled everything.

And it very nearly worked, because grief did exactly what he was counting on it to do: it took away my ability to see.