I am sixty-seven years old, and I had been married to Thomas for forty-two of those years, and I believed, with the full confidence of a woman who had shared a bed and a bathroom and a kitchen table and a car and a grief and a joy with the same man for four decades, that I knew every inch of him. I was wrong about that in the way you can only be wrong about something you never thought to question. The funeral director was a gentle man, the kind of gentle that comes from years of proximity to loss rather than from natural temperament.

He showed me into the room and told me to take all the time I needed, and when he pulled the door closed behind him the sound of the latch was the quietest sound I had ever heard, and the room settled into the particular silence that belongs to places where the living come to say things the dead cannot answer. Thomas lay in the navy suit he had worn to Daniel’s graduation. I had chosen it deliberately.

I had stood in front of his closet for a long time, moving through the hangers, dismissing the gray he wore to the Hendersons’ anniversary party and the brown that had belonged to an argument we never finished, until I found the navy, which belonged to a May afternoon when the light was very good and our son walked across a stage and Thomas put his arm around me and said into my ear, we did something right, and I had thought yes, we did, we really did. I wanted him dressed in something that held a good memory. I wanted the last version of him that people saw to carry some of that afternoon’s uncomplicated light.

They had cut his hair too short. It was the first thing I noticed when I walked to him and looked at his face, which was still in the way that faces go still, the expression composed into something that resembled rest without being it. He had always worn his hair a certain way, not long exactly but full enough, swept back from his ears and temples with the comfortable certainty of a man who had found a style in his thirties and saw no reason to revise it.

I raised my hand and smoothed it the way I had done thousands of times, mornings before work when his hair was still disordered from sleep, evenings on the couch when I reached over without thinking, the unconscious intimacy of people who have shared space long enough that touch becomes a language too ordinary to name. That was when I saw it. It was just above his right ear, partially exposed by the unfamiliar shortness of the cut, hidden by a half inch of gray.