Eight months later, I returned to the cabin where he died. It was mid-June and the sun was warm. Yellow irises were blooming on the shore at the far end of the pond. I sat for hours on the dock until the light began to fade and I knew it was time to move on.

Desmond closed the book. Luckily, he’d decided to read the final pages of Dead Husband here, in the privacy of his shrinking room, instead of at his office at school, or worse still, in a coffee shop or some other public place where someone might have witnessed him shedding real tears—twice in the past hour.

This was hardly the reaction he’d anticipated when he went out last night and bought a copy of Rosemary’s slim, successful memoir. There was that absurdly bad title, for one thing, and for another, there was chilly, churlish Rosemary herself. He’d been expecting one of those self-serving, pity-me tomes, full of trumped-up anguish and insulting jabs aimed at everyone who had the misfortune of crossing the author’s path. What he found instead was a love story and one of the more moving love stories he’d read in years. Although billed as a memoir of widowhood, it was really a portrait of a complicated and loving marriage. More pages were devoted to the living Charlie than to the corpse of the title, and Rosemary herself came off as a fiercely independent woman who also managed to be an unapologetically devoted wife. More to the point, she came off as a person with something of importance to say on the subject of love.

He kept waiting for Jane to make an appearance in the book, but the closest to a mention he was able to find was reference to a friend named “Karla” (quote marks Rosemary’s) who lived in Detroit and had made a second marriage to a loutish man for money and security after divorcing a handsome skirt chaser. This was in a chapter called “The Other Widows,” a list of friends and relatives who’d lost their husbands, not to death, but to lovers, divorce, or, in one case, disappearance. “The world rallies around them, touched as they are by the glamour of abandonment and betrayal, rather than the stench of death.” That was one way of looking at it.

He checked his watch. It was almost nine o’clock. He had no idea what Rosemary’s social life was like, but it was a Saturday night and therefore unlikely she’d be asleep, assuming she hadn’t drunk herself into a stupor. And even if she had, he didn’t object to the thought of rousing her. Earlier in the evening, he and Russell had had one of their most distressing conversations yet, and surprisingly, he found himself longing to talk about it with Rosemary.