It was childish, all of her not-talking. Rosemary gave her too much attention for it, if you ask me. It was like watching an overprotective parent by a seesaw. She’d start her sentences, finish her sentences. I couldn’t be doing with it. Meg could talk if she wanted to, but she could shut herself up like a clam if she wanted to do that. As if she were the only one who’d ever lost a thing they cared about. As if she were the only one who’d ever had a love that spoiled, or a life they’d loved that turned to shit.

Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t dislike her. She was nice enough, just so caught up in herself all the time. But they came as a package, I could see that. Rosemary felt sorry for us both. Meg had lost herself out there, hadn’t she? Me—I knew exactly where I was, but by God I was lonely.

It might have been different if I’d had children, though by the time we moved to that house any child we’d had would’ve been all grown up and minding their own business. They’d not have stuck around—even a daughter—not with Norman being the way he was. I’d have been lucky to get a card on Mother’s Day, and no flowers. There wouldn’t have been a florist who delivered so far out of town.

No, it was better, I think, that we stayed on our own, but I did miss being around people. I missed the gossip and the news, even hearing what people’s kids were getting up to, once they got to an age where they did more than cut another tooth and fill their pants.

I missed Norman—the way we’d been in the beginning, in the years before he got sick, and the years before that, back in England, side by side in our recliners in front of the television on a Saturday night, two glasses and a bottle of wine on the nest of tables between us, Bruce Forsyth and the Two Ronnies. God, we used to laugh! I’d give anything to have just one of those simple Saturday nights at home again. That home. The one I thought we’d live in forever. Just one night.

It’s incredible how completely your life can change when you haven’t made any steps to change it yourself. They say time passes and things change, and of course it does, of course they do, but you’re not always responsible for those changes. You can call it fate or consequence, but sometimes it’s just other people knocking a bloody domino.

All Norman did these days was stumble through jigsaws and stare into space. I didn’t love him anymore. I didn’t even like him very much. But he was my husband, and that meant something when I took it on. Was I a good wife? Yes, I was, and I was loyal. I kept every promise I made. As God is my witness, they can’t say I didn’t do that.

Do you know, he asked me to kill him a few times. In his more lucid moments, he’d held both my hands in his and pleaded with me. ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ he whispered, and I could have done it, held a pillow over his face and pushed hard. I don’t suppose it would have been that difficult; he had about the strength of a plastic fork. And I don’t suppose there’d have been any suspicion—a sick old man dead in his sleep—but for all that I disliked the man he’d become, I didn’t want him dead.

I didn’t want to be on my own.

And then I met Rosemary and Meg.