He kept pausing.

Not from confusion — his mind was clear to the last — but because each clause of it cost him something.

Writing your own wife out of your will is not a triumph, even when she has earned it a hundred times over; it is the formal, notarized admission that a thing you once hoped for has failed completely, and he felt every line of that.

At one point he set the pen down and looked out the window for a long moment, and I thought he might stop, might soften it, might leave her something out of the sheer force of thirty years of habit.