I rang my husband thirty-one times from the hospital while his mother was fading beside me. On the last one another woman answered, laughed, and told me to stop calling like a desperate wife.

PART 1

She said: he’s in the shower, old wife. We’re having the time of our lives in Maui.

A woman laughed into that phone, and the sound carried right across the stillness of that room.

Behind her voice I could hear waves going in along a shore, and the crisp snap of a champagne bottle being opened.

I did not shout. I did not ask who she was.

I have been asked about that more than anything else, and the honest answer is that there was a woman in the bed four feet away and I was not going to have that conversation over her.

I stood beside Veda’s bed holding my phone while twenty years of marriage rearranged themselves in my head.

My name is Saffira and I am fifty-one, and I had not slept properly in nine days.

I want that in here because people assume there was a moment of towering clarity in that room, and there was not. I was so tired I had to hold the bed rail.