Gregor found me in the spring, through Marva, who asked me first whether I wanted to be found, and I surprised us both by saying yes.

I had thought I would not want to see him.

But I was closer to the end by then, and I had discovered in myself an unexpected largeness — not forgiveness, not yet, but a kind of spaciousness that dying seems to give you, a sense that the accounts were being closed and I would rather close them clean.

He came to the apartment.

Marva let him in and then left us, though she made a point of telling him, in the doorway, that I tired easily and he was not to stay long, and I loved her fiercely for the small fierce management of it.

And Gregor stood in my bright plain living room, this man I had been married to for twenty-two years, and he looked, for the first time in longer than I could remember, as though he were actually seeing me — seeing the woman in the chair by the window, thinner now, yellowed, her own books stacked on the floor, her own coffee cooling on the sill.