There were rumbles of the war during her illness, but he didn’t hear them, he only heard her crying. She made him sleep on the couch because she couldn’t bear to have him near and not be intimate. He was a doctor, he had seen the worst wounds, the most horrible tumors, but this was different. He made up a bed on the couch in the library, but he didn’t sleep. He continued to see patients for a while, but he couldn’t stand to hear their complaints, and in time, he sent them away, to another doctor in Lyon, though it was farther for his neighbors who had so relied upon him. He could not focus and he feared his preoccupation with Sarah’s illness might cause him to make some terrible error in handling their care. He would not be able to live with himself if he made a mistake because he was more concerned with his wife than with any of them, men, women, and children alike. All the same, people from the village brought cakes and bread and stews. They left the covered platters of homemade food on the doorstep. They came at dusk so he wouldn’t see them and feel he must politely engage them. It was clear they felt there was no need for him to thank them. That was when he understood that his wife was dying.

Finally, Sarah gave in and let him come back to their bedroom to sleep beside her. When he held her in the dark, he could feel another lump in her other breast, and another under her arm. He didn’t have to tell her. She knew. That was why she had allowed him back. Nothing mattered anymore, not how she looked or how frail she had become. This was the only time they had, this and nothing more.

“I’m filled with stones,” she told him, and it was true. Often a patient knew more than her doctor, especially when the doctor didn’t wish to know. When he brought her back to Lyon, her surgeon X-rayed her and discovered the cancer was in many other places, her lungs, her liver, her spine. This doctor was a younger man, and he thought because he was dealing with another doctor there was no need to mince words. “A few months at most,” he said to Girard.