Wade reached for me again, but I struck his hand away.
“How?”
His mouth moved before any sound came. “Pancreatic cancer.”
I stared at him.
“Metastatic by the time they found it,” he continued. “Liver. Lymph nodes. By the end, his lungs.”
“By the end.”
Wade swallowed.
I seized those three words because they were easier to understand than dead. “There was an end. There was a whole end, Wade?”
“Yes.”
“And I didn’t know.”
His gaze dropped to the carpet.
“When?”
“Meryl—”
“When did my husband die?”
“Your ex-husband,” he said softly, and then his face tightened as if he wished he could pull the correction back out of the air.
I laughed once. It came out ugly. “Oh, thank you. God forbid we misstate the paperwork.”
“I’m sorry.”
“When?”
“Five months ago.”
The hallway seemed to narrow.
Five months.
Five months ago I had been sick enough that Elise had slept in the recliner beside my bed because I could not keep water down. Five months ago Jonah had driven through a thunderstorm to get a prescription the pharmacy near me did not carry. Five months ago I had lain awake imagining Randall somewhere comfortable and free of me, perhaps congratulating himself for escaping before the worst of it.
