make his irritation visible.
“Nobody is attacking you,” he said.
That was when Margaret understood how the next few days would go.
They would use soft voices.
They would call control concern.
They would call pressure help.
They would speak over her, around her, and finally for her if she let them.
She went to bed that night without undressing.
Robert’s side of the mattress was cold.
His reading glasses still sat on the nightstand on top of a paperback mystery he had been halfway through when the final hospital
