But I didn’t yet know where. Perhaps the kitchen? The laundry room? Someplace where she would not always think, This is where Max told me. There is nowhere that memory can’t find, can’t trickle in. That’s why in my will I have set aside money and suggested Hadley use it to have our beach house remodeled. That was something I’d talked about in therapy with Carol. I wanted to give Hadley a chance to restructure what had been ours into something imperatively hers.

After my diagnosis, I began visiting our seaside cottage more often, ostensibly to work on my new big project. And on weekends, my wife would drive out in her white sports car. You know you love someone when, at the sound of tires rolling over small stones in the driveway, you inflate like a balloon.

The day I was to make my announcement, Hadley arrived from the city as usual. It was Friday evening. I went outside to carry in the duffel bag she would always stuff with clothes and magazines. It was brown and had an exterior pocket for her tennis racquet.

“How was the traffic?” I asked, opening the hood of the car for her bag. But she was already halfway up the steps.

“Fine,” she replied over her shoulder, “once I got through Queens.”

When she was in the house, I climbed into the driver’s seat. Touched the thick wheel, still warm where her hands had been moments before. I closed both eyes and inhaled the scent of lavender hand cream.

By the early hours of tomorrow morning our old lives would be over. We would be different people in a different house⁠—dead without having died.

Inside, I dropped Hadley’s bag by the umbrella stand and called her name. No reply. Then I heard the upstairs bathroom flush. I took the steps slowly and drifted into the bedroom. She was removing her shoes by reaching around and pulling from the heel.

“Want to lay down for a minute?” she asked, falling back onto the feather duvet.

It was something I wanted, but was afraid to bring up, in light of my plans.

We didn’t need to draw the shades as in the city because our house was quite far from any others, with an expanse of olive-green marshland where the pool house ended. Over the years, we had made love many times in that pool house. We’d sleep there, too, during the change in season when it was too cool for mosquitoes but remnants of summer lingered, like those birds that sing after dark.

In November, with the pool closed, we lay out blankets and read novels in heavy sweaters. Winter was coming. We could taste it in our mouths. Occasionally there would be gunshots. Hunters in the marshes on flat boats. It was the only time Hadley used the f-word. To describe those men.