Let me be nervous.”

I laughed.

I want that on the record.

I laughed, because it was a funny line delivered well by a man who was good at that, and I took it as a joke, and I have not been able to take it as a joke for one second since the ninth of January.

Part Nine: Twenty-One Days

He went into a hospice residence in Bloomington on the fifteenth of December, three days after the ceremony.

He had been eligible for weeks and had been refusing it, and I found out afterward from a social worker named Priyanka Sodhi that the thing that changed was the marriage, because a man who goes into a residence with nobody coming and a man who goes in with a wife are having two different experiences and he knew it.