Suddenly he was always in a good mood around her, she said. Oh not that he enjoyed seeing her suffer, she said. He wasn’t a monster. He was not the best of husbands, no, but he had always been a decent man. But he could not hide his feelings, she said. Not from her. In the hospital, she said, I would look at the other people visiting patients on my ward. I looked at their faces, and I looked at the faces of my children and my other family and friends, and I saw the same sadness and fear. But never a look like that from him, she said. And never tears. Once when he thought I was asleep I was actually secretly watching him, she told the group. He was sitting in a chair by the window, his legs crossed, swinging one foot. He was staring out the window with his face turned up toward the sky, and the look on his face was the look of a man contented, a man quite satisfied with the way things were. Then he stretched out his legs and leaned back with his hands clasped behind his neck, she said. Now he was studying the ceiling. After a few moments, as the woman described it, he breathed a deep sigh and broke into a smile.

According to my friend, the woman told the group that she had wanted to tell her husband to stay away, she did not want him to come to the hospital anymore. She wanted to tell him that he wasn’t fooling her, she who knew him better than anyone—as if after forty years she could not tell what he was feeling. As if I could not read him like a book, she said. As if I could not hear his heart singing Freedom.

But she couldn’t do it, she said. She did not have the courage to confront him, my friend told me the woman told the others in the group. The truth was, she felt bad for him. I was so ashamed of him, she said, that I pitied him. Though I hated him for not at least trying to hide his feelings, I thought maybe the truth was that he wasn’t able to. I thought it was possible that he didn’t even know this about himself, that he was in denial about his feelings (which would have been just like him, she said), and he would have been outraged if I—

And here she paused, needing a moment to collect herself.