“No! We’re not animals in a zoo, okay? We came here for dinner and to be left the fuck alone!”

His anger . . . it was so rare, so unlike him, her heart was thudding sickly, and if she wasn’t really careful, she’d cry, which wouldn’t help anything. Everyone was staring. “Can we cancel the rest of our order?” she asked, and the waiter nodded and scurried away. “Josh. Come on. We’re leaving.”

Rigid with fury, he let her take his arm, and they walked back toward their suite. His strides were long, and she was out of breath before they’d made it ten yards. “Okay, enough,” she said sharply. “I can’t keep up. Can you slow down, please?”

He jerked to a stop. “They had no fucking business—”

“Josh! Knock it off! They were trying to do something nice, that’s all.”

“I don’t care.”

He wasn’t mad at the offer. He was angry because . . . because she was sick. Because life wasn’t fair. And Josh wasn’t good with anger. It flummoxed him, confused him, ate at him.

“Sweetheart, go for long walk or run, okay? I know you’re upset. Just . . . burn it off. I’m gonna go to the bar and eat and read, and I’ll see you when you’re . . . over this.”

“Fine.” He strode off, and Lauren went back to the restaurant, apologized to the waiter, left him a big tip and went to the bar, collapsing into a booth, winded and distressed, trying not to cry.

She wasn’t mad at him. She was heartbroken for him. Those people had touched a nerve by singling them out, and all Josh wanted was for them to be a normal couple, in love, enjoying each other.

Not a couple with a clock ticking. Not a couple where one would be left alone.

How could she do this to him? How could she help him, her beautiful loner husband? What would happen to him? He had told her she was his first love. “My one and only,” he’d said. But in a year or three or ten, he’d be a widower. Being alone by choice was one thing. Her death . . . it could ruin him. She could ruin the person she loved best in the world.

She went back to the empty suite and got ready for bed. She missed Pebbles. She missed Josh. She missed her sister. The skylight above their bed showed the vast, starlit sky, and tears trickled out of her eyes and into the pillow.

But sleep wasn’t a choice as much as a necessity, and the bed was huge and white and cool, and within minutes, she was asleep.

Sometime later, she woke up to Josh getting into bed. He wrapped her in his arms and kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“It’s okay.”