The afternoon sun spilled into the bedroom. Even in the last couple of hours, the heat had intensified the smell. The bunches of lavender he’d hung from the curtain pole and the lampshade and door handle had helped to mask it, but it hadn’t been enough to smother it completely.

For the last few months he’d been dreading the fall of the guillotine, but now that it had happened, he felt strangely calm, as if he had been poised for it all along, neck exposed on the block.

He looked at his wife and he thought he might cry.

He had kept her safe for eight months. Placing her in the chest freezer in the garage a couple of days after she died, almost breaking his arm as he slipped on the icy path. Bringing her back into their home on the nights his grief threatened to swallow him, a black mouth of sorrow and despair. Laying her on the bed, still wearing her favorite nightdress.

Light as feather, she’d been when she died. A sparrow. That first time, he’d carried her body by himself. But the freezer had weighted her down. Now he couldn’t manage on his own. He had to use a pallet truck to lift the rigid shape of her, and tie a sheet around her waist to drag her upstairs.

They’d accused him of killing her, those dirty-mouthed kids. The police would think the same. But it wasn’t like that. He could never have hurt Annie. But the disease had eaten her from the inside without either of them knowing.

First symptoms in November. Diagnosed in December. Dead by January.

Her hands had been like paper at the end, dry as dust. She had placed one on his cheek.

“Let me go,” she had said.

His sorrow had spilled over, tears streaking the hollows of his face. He had turned away from the bed so she wouldn’t see.

“I’m sorry,” he had said, wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his sweater.

“Don’t be sorry.” Her voice was soft. “Your tears show me that you still feel something for this old, useless body of mine.” She’d tried to laugh, but it had turned into a cough and she’d squeezed his hand. He’d stroked the back of hers with his thumb. The hand he had held for fifty-nine years, that had guided and steadied him, that had shown him love in a thousand tiny ways.

He’d stayed with her for hours, listening to the rattle in her throat, the rapid breaths and the long pauses between breathing, reluctant to leave, even to use the bathroom or fetch himself a drink.

He was still holding her hand when her grip slackened and the room flatlined into silence.