Chapter 19

Connie

She almost missed it.

She had been awake for most of the night and somewhere in the early hours her body had simply taken what it needed without asking and she had drifted into a shallow uncertain sleep with her arms still around Serena and her face still pressed against her hair.

What woke her was the stillness.

Not a sound. Not a movement. The opposite — a quality of stillness that was different from sleep, different from the drift, different from anything she had felt in the weeks of lying beside her counting breaths. A stillness with intention in it.

She surfaced immediately.

The room was grey with early light. The lamp was off. The ring on Serena’s finger had been there since the night they made their vows and it would be there until the end and Connie had made sure of that every single day.

Serena was looking at her.

Not drifting. Not somewhere else. Looking at her — fully, directly, with the dark eyes that Connie had memorized on the park bench every morning since February, the eyes that were present and clear and completely here.

Connie went very still.

“Hey,” Serena said.

Her voice was quiet but it was her voice. Not the halting uncertain voice of the past weeks. Her voice. The one that had delivered a thousand deadpan observations about Gerald and Cochran and the redeemability of fictional heroes and the ironic injustice of having to prove she was eighteen in an adult store.

“Hey,” Connie said. Her own voice came out barely above a whisper.

Serena looked at her face for a long moment. The way she had looked at things she wanted to remember — with her whole attention, deliberately, making sure it was fully received before she let it go.

“I know you,” she said.

“Yes,” Connie said.

“You’re my wife.”

“Yes.”

“Connie,” Serena said. Just her name. Said the way you say the name of something you have been looking for and finally found.

Connie felt the tears arrive and didn’t try to stop them.

“I’m here,” she said. “I’m right here. I promised you.”

Serena looked at her for another long moment. The clarity in her eyes was complete and unambiguous — she was here, fully here, the disease retreated for this one last window the way it had no right to and had anyway. She lifted her hand slowly, with the effort of someone moving through something thick, and touched Connie’s face. The same gesture she had made on that first morning in the kitchen when she had cupped her face in both hands and said, “I trust you completely.”