Enjoy your life after I’m gone, Jon would tell Rachel. Go to the theater with rich widowers. Travel. Just promise me you won’t die first. But then her cancer returned, and she tried to prepare him, explaining where the passwords were filed, how to use Venmo and WAZE, telling him which of her widowed friends would be best for him. He wasn’t interested. Not in talking about a future without her. Not in any of her lady friends.

When the doctors say they’ve done all they can, Rachel asks to spend her last days at the lake house, the place where she and Jon had wed and where they’ve spent every summer of their married life. Although it is only September and the days are still mild, she lies shivering in their bed, swaddled like an infant in wool blankets. On good days, she asks to be propped on pillows so she can gaze out the window at the garden they built at the top of the dune, the stone staircase winding down to the macadam brick road, and the tufted beach grass stretching to the shore beyond. On the afternoon of September 14, a week before their fifty-third wedding anniversary, Jon tiptoes up the stairs to check on her. He asks whether he can get her anything: water, a popsicle, her Oxy.

“Tea would be nice,” she tells him.

When he returns with the steaming cup, she is gone.

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