The Last Appointment

Three days.

The letter sat on her nightstand like a small, patient animal. She walked past it in the morning. She walked past it at night. She took her meals in the kitchen, which was the only room in the house that hadn't changed — still the same distance from the hallway, still the same number of tiles on the floor, still the same view of the backyard and its single, skeletal birch tree standing in the fog like an X-ray of itself.

The rest of the house had gone quiet. No settling, no creaking, no radiator coughs. The silence was worse than the sounds had been, because silence in an old house isn't the absence of noise — it's the presence of attention. The house was waiting. Miriam knew it was waiting because she was waiting too, and she and the house had always been synchronized in ways she preferred not to examine.

On the third evening, she sat on the edge of her bed and picked up the envelope and opened it.

David's handwriting filled the page — not a full page, not even half, just a few lines in that climbing script she hadn't seen in twelve years, and the sight of it did something to the room. The temperature changed. Not colder, not warmer. Specific. The temperature of the bedroom on Sunday mornings when David would bring her coffee and she'd pretend to be asleep so she could listen to him hum while he set the mug on the nightstand. That exact temperature. The temperature of being loved by someone who was paying attention.

Miriam,

I never asked, and I should have. I was afraid the answer would break something, and I was afraid it wouldn't, and I couldn't decide which scared me more.