He pointed to the framed diploma over his desk, above a second one just like it. “Dr. Sweeny encouraged me to try pre-med, and I was surprised to find I liked it. Sarah and I lived together after our freshman year in an apartment in New Haven. We thought we were getting away with it, but I found out much later that our parents knew but chose to ignore it. They’d learned by then not to fight what’d been happening between us since we were kids.”

“It’s so sweet,” Clare said, touched by his story but filled with anxiety about where it was leading.

His face twisted into a small, sad smile. “We got married in Chatham right after we graduated from Yale. It was the very best day of my life, and it was almost ten years to the day after we first met. I went on to medical school at Yale. She’d gotten her degree in fine arts, and she worked in the university’s art department. We were poor but happy. I decided to follow Dr. Sweeny into cardiology. I got through my internship at Yale-New Haven and applied for a residency at Mass General in Boston. We wanted to move closer to home because Sarah was finally pregnant. We’d been trying to have a baby for a long time.”

Clare gasped as it registered that whatever had happened to his beloved wife had taken a child from him, too. Oh, God. I can’t hear this. The tortured look on his face broke her heart. “Aidan, honey, maybe that’s enough for now.”

He shook his head. “I need to finish this.” After a deep breath, he said, “She was two months pregnant when she found a lump in her breast.”

Clare whimpered.

“Her father pulled strings to get her in with the best oncologist in the city. Within a day, we knew it was bad—stage-three breast cancer. She was twenty-nine.” He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe it, even all these years later. “It was aggressive. They wanted to admit her right away and start her on chemo, but they’d have to terminate the pregnancy.”

“Oh, Aidan.” Tears spilled down Clare’s cheeks.

“She wouldn’t do it. I pleaded with her, but she wouldn’t kill the child we’d wanted so badly. I told her it was her I couldn’t live without, and we could have other babies when she got well.” He shook his head and brushed at a tear on his face. “I yelled and screamed until I was hoarse, and then I begged, but I couldn’t change her mind. Over time, I’ve come to understand that she knew she was going to die, and she didn’t want me to be alone.”

Clare wanted to touch him, but he was so far from her just then that she was afraid she would startle him.