Im waiting in the living room, pretending and knowing that I will be caught and that I am not a widow, Im just a weeping and annoyed wife. Brian will be gone from my life soon, although I dont yet know how soon, and hes also still a man with a cold. Its a cold, not pleurisy, is what I think, even as I am tearing the fringe off a pillow at the thought of his not being upstairs any longer, not having a cold, not being a sick man than whom there is no one sicker, as I have said to him. One time, I said that I had friends with metastatic breast cancer who complained less about that than he did about his cold. And then he wont be there for me to say it to him.

In Love by Amy Bloom