The light grows even brighter, so bright she can’t see Josh anymore, but she feels him inside every molecule of her, the pulse and thrum of his life.

She is the light now, and though her old body is done, and her old self is gone, her true self would never leave him.

He was, and is, and always would be, the love of her life.

36

Joshua

Month seventeen

July

IT HAD TAKEN some time to get over that final letter. To remember her last day in all its excruciating, beautiful detail.

In some ways, it was like losing her all over again. But when he reread the letters, when he saw the scope of what she’d done, he was so, so grateful for her kindness, her forethought. She had spent her last months thinking about his life after hers, and how to help him.

And she had. Because of her, he had Radley as a friend. He had a new job because he’d gone to that conference. He was part of the community, more than he’d ever been. He owned a new house that, someday, would be his children’s home. He knew karate.

He was so grateful that, for that first year without her, his wife’s love had walked beside him.

And he was better. He was doing fine. He’d invited all of Lauren’s family to have pizza at his offices one night, and pushed Octavia and Sebastian around in the comfy office chairs, making them shriek with glee. The next week, when Jen had her third baby, he’d visited her and his new baby niece in the hospital, and he didn’t cry. They asked him to be godfather to Leah Grace, and of course he said yes.

A few weeks ago, he’d flown to Singapore and spent two weeks there, working with the team, attending meetings, going out for dinner. The company put him up in a swanky rental apartment with a balcony overlooking the sparkling city and told him it was his whenever he needed to come out. They showed him the design for an MRI-guided ultrasound device that would ablate tiny particles of brain matter for people with persistent tremors. It had the potential to treat epilepsy with some modifications, too. Within an hour, Josh had tweaked the design so it required two fewer parts and would cost significantly less to produce.

Back in Rhode Island, he packed up the apartment, putting all but two photos of him and Lauren in a box. He put her more valuable jewelry in a safe-deposit box to give to Sebastian, Octavia and Leah someday. He kept a few things from his married life to bring to his new house, then invited Lauren’s friends to come and take whatever they wanted—a rug, a lamp, a painting.

And then, amid the boxes and paintings in the now-echoing apartment, he took off his wedding ring.