We had taken to sitting side by side on the sofa when we were together in the living room, semi-recumbent with our legs stretched out and our feet up on the coffee table. She would nestle against me, sometimes letting her head drop to my shoulder. More than once while I was reading she fell asleep. I would stop reading and keep very still, alternately soothed and tormented by the sound of her breathing. I would remember the vigil at my father’s hospital bedside, when his breathing had become so labored that it was as if there were some malfunctioning machine in the room, and the shock of it ceasing, like that, as if the machine had been switched off, and the silence that followed, louder than his breathing had been, louder than any machine, louder than anything I’d ever heard before in my life.

Or we’d sit together in the same position on the two-seater on the back porch, from where we liked to watch the sunset. Sometimes we linked arms or clasped hands. (Touch is so important.) At such moments I felt that she was as much a comfort to me as I was meant to be to her. Every now and then she would squeeze my hand without saying anything—without needing to say anything—but it was as if she had squeezed my heart.

Golden hour, magic hour, l’heure bleue. Evenings when the beauty of the changing sky made us both go still and dreamy. Sunlight falling at an angle across the lawn so that it touched our elevated feet, then moved up our bodies like a long slow blessing, and I found myself a breath away from believing that everything was as it should be. See the moon. Count the stars. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end (Joyce). Infinitely rich, infinitely beautiful. Everything was going to be all right.

Once as I was turning a page she picked her head up off my shoulder and kissed me. I laughed, startled, then kissed her back. And because she could never pass up an opening for a joke, she whined a pitch-perfect imitation of Bette Davis as Baby Jane: You mean all this time we could’ve been lovers?

I’ve been so selfish, she said. I never thought about you. I guess I couldn’t allow myself to. But now that we’re here, now that all this is happening (all this: the inexorable, the inexpressible), I feel guilty.

But I want to be here, I said. And as I said it I realized it was absolutely true. Nothing could have torn me away.

That wasn’t what she meant, she said. It’s that I feel guilty about leaving you behind.