On the morning of Saturday January 21, 2017, you didn’t wake up. Not at six thirty or seven, the time you were normally having your coffee and finishing your Sudoku. Or at eight or eight thirty, the time you’d wake after a dinner party with girlfriends, or even nine if you’d managed to get through a few bottles of wine together. By ten I managed to make myself think, Good for her, she’s having a lie-in. You’d gone to bed early the night before. We were watching coverage of Donald Trump’s inauguration when you began to complain of a headache. I joked you could expect to have one for the next four years. As the evening wore on it developed into a migraine, which of course worried us in light of your Transient Ischemic Attack. TIA. What your doctor had called “a warning stroke.”

You said, “I’m going to turn in,” and as you walked upstairs I called, “Make sure to keep your head propped up,” for which I had absolutely no idea if there was any medical basis.

By ten thirty that morning I was sitting on my bed checking emails, waiting for the soft thud of your feet hitting the floor of your bedroom, the creak of the floorboards, the scraping of hangers in your closet. But the usual sounds didn’t come. Not even a cough or the rustling of sheets. Only the occasional passing car punctuated the silence, the spitting of its tires on the asphalt suggesting the snow was melting to slush. I’d made plans to meet Ana downtown for the Women’s March at noon; she was back in Ottawa visiting family as well. She sent me a photo of herself wearing her pink knitted Pussy Hat and a giant fabric banner she’d sewn declaring, I’m So Angry I Stiched This Just So I Could Stab Something 3000 Times. The text was laid out like a rainbow above a raised fist holding a large knitting needle.

“Purrrrrfection,” I texted back, before pointing out that she’d forgotten the “t” in “stitched.”

“Pretty sure Trump can’t read anyway,” she replied.