My husband became an organ donor as his final wish — after he d*ed, his doctor stopped me and said, “There’s something he made me promise to give you only after he was gone.”

“Me too.”

After I hung up, I sat for a while in the quiet of the living room.

Josephine was asleep in her chair.

The winter light was coming through the window at a low angle, the way it does in January, making everything look a little softer than it is.

On the mantelpiece was a photograph of Mark — one I had taken on the porch the summer before he got sick, squinting into the sun the same way Daniel had squinted in his photograph.

I hadn’t taken it down.

I wasn’t sure I would.

He had been complicated.

He had been cowardly in one very significant way, and brave in others.

He had loved me, and he had kept a secret that had no good justification, and he had spent his last weeks trying to repair what he could from a hospital bed with a letter and a photograph and a doctor he trusted to wait for the right moment.