“You should still talk to her.” Giancarlo dropped two lumps of sugar into his coffee, stirred through the liquid with a teaspoon. “It helps, weirdly, to tell them about your day. That’s why I still do the crossword. It makes me ask her what the answer should be, and I try to imagine what she would say.” He gave a small chuckle, a longer sigh as he thought of his wife. “Even if she didn’t know, she would come up with some crazy idea, make me laugh, make me remember once again how very much I loved her.”

At home, Emily would communicate through email, or say a few passing words to the people she came across during everyday life, but it had only ever been with Catriona that she had formed a real conversation. Or Milton, but that was always decidedly one-sided. The very fact she couldn’t ever talk to her grandmother again had fallen, like a stone, inside her soul and was refusing to budge, no matter how many times she reminded herself she had known it was coming. Her death wasn’t a surprise, although it was still a shock whenever she went to make a cup of tea and automatically took down two cups.

“It’s too hard,” she said, picking up her silver teaspoon and twirling it between her fingers.

“We are all dying, Emily. It’s how we choose to live that we can control, nothing else.”

“Don’t you miss her?”

Giancarlo sighed as he took hold of her hand, patted it gently. “Every day. But Gigi lived life to its fullest. She ate everything, drank everything, danced in a thunderstorm and chose not to regret a thing, because it was a complete waste of time to look back.”

“Sounds like something Grandma would say.”

“I didn’t have to watch her suffer, like you did. It was the most horrific experience of my life, but she went without pain.”

“I wanted her to fight.”

“Catriona was powerful, she had such strength, even in the darkest of times.” He looked at her then, opened his mouth, closed it, almost as if he weren’t sure if he should say what he was about to. “She read a poem at Gigi’s funeral. I hated her for it at the time, but now I understand what it was she was trying to make me, make us all, understand.”

Emily clenched her jaw, ignoring the spasm down one side of her neck and how her hands balled into fists as he began to speak, taking care over each syllable. “A total stranger one black day…”

Stop. Please stop, she thought as she realized that Giancarlo was reciting a poem by e. e. cummings. The words pushed inside her mind, swirled all around, pulling up all sorts of memories and emotions she wanted to ignore.

“Giancarlo, please.”

He was crying as he took hold of her hands and slowly eased them open, but the words kept coming.

“I can’t,” she gasped between breaths, aware of the tears that were falling from her own eyes, because she knew the poem. Her grandmother had made her read it, dissect it, along with countless others about death, about sorrow. So many lessons her grandmother had tried to teach her, things she had steadfastly refused to hear.