I bought exactly the coffee I liked, not the coffee Gregor liked, and drank it at whatever hour I pleased.

I walked in the gardens every day the weather allowed and some days it didn’t, slowly, because I tired quickly now, resting on the benches and watching the light come through the big glasshouse, and I read — I read the way I had read as a young woman, greedily, hours at a stretch, books stacked on the floor by the chair because I no longer had anyone to keep a tidy house for.

Marva came Tuesdays and we talked the way we had before I disappeared.

I was dying, and I want to be clear that I knew it, that the fatigue was worsening and the day was coming, and I want to be equally clear that those were some of the happiest months of my life, and that there is no contradiction in that, though people seem to need there to be one.

I was not happy because I was dying.

I was happy because I was, at last, alive — awake in my own life, present in my own days, a person again instead of a fixture — and the cruel arithmetic that I had found this only at the end did not cancel the joy of having found it at all.