I didn’t take the apartment; I also didn’t let Claire keep carrying his ghost alone. We sat at her tiny kitchen table, two women drinking bitter coffee over the ruins of the same man, and sorted his things into piles that made no emotional sense: scarves he’d bought her, recipes he’d copied from my box, ticket stubs from concerts he’d attended with neither of us. Grief, I learned, could hold betrayal in one hand and tenderness in the other without dropping either. When I finally stepped back into the Paris street, the air felt colder and, somehow, more honest.

I walked the city he’d promised me, not as his widow or his victim, but as the only person left who could decide what my life meant. I ate alone without shrinking, wrapped myself in an indecently expensive blue scarf, and wrote a new salutation in a fresh notebook: Dear Me. Back in Ohio, I planted tulips I might never see and taught my grandsons gin rummy, letting them crow when they won. The doctors’ timeline narrowed, but my days widened. On a gray March morning, the first green tips pierced the soil I’d doubted I’d outlive. I opened my notebook, hands trembling from illness and something like joy, and answered the woman I had finally chosen. Dear Me, I wrote. Look.