Turns out I won’t. I anchor the note with a clear glass paperweight and go upstairs. This is the last time I’ll climb these steps, I want to tell myself, but the information remains stubbornly at the door of my brain. No admittance.

Chip is coming out of the bathroom when I reach the top of the stairs. “Got it?” he asks, and I say, “Yes, I’ve brought breakfast for both of us.” I put the tray at the foot of the bed. Then, “Be right back,” I tell him.

I go into the bathroom and wash my face, brush my teeth. And then I just stand there, looking into the mirror. I reach my hand out to touch my reflection, then wipe my prints from the glass. I ball up a piece of Kleenex to lay over the bag of pills in my pocket. Then I go into the bedroom to lie next to Chip.

“I took the first one about twenty minutes ago,” he says.

When I hear him say these words, I feel like screaming. Instead, I say, “Oh. Okay.”

“Now I’m supposed to eat something.”

I pour tea for both of us, my hands steady. I think of the elegant composition of water, wire-and-wooden-bead models of atoms, the chemistry class I took one winter and loved. I remember the high, arched windows of that classroom, the smell of heat, the hissing radiators. Once, it began snowing when I was in that class, and it was one of those impossibly gorgeous snowfalls, the flakes so huge they looked fake, they looked like torn-up pieces of paper. And the professor looked out the window and told us all to stop writing and start watching. He was an old guy, with his priorities in the right place. He didn’t mind giving up a lecture on chemistry for a ballet of snow.

“Not a great last meal,” Chip says, smiling.

I jerk back into the present and look at the remaining piece of bread on the plate, browned evenly. “It is good, though,” I say, taking one bite, then another. Tea. Toast. It’s a perfect meal.

I lean back against my pillow and and feel a sorrowful resignation, a letting go before the letting go. I think of dandelions gone to seed, that fragile whiteness held upright and waiting for the breeze that will both end and begin it. I always loved dandelions in that state. As a child, I frustrated myself by trying to make bouqets from them. Over and over I would try to bring them together, and over and over they would fall apart.

“I’m supposed to take that big bunch of yellow capsules next,” Chip says. “And then after just a few minutes, I take the red ones.”

“All right.” Now I know what to do.

“You’ll help me if I … if anything happens, right?”

“Yes.”