“Well, I didn’t find him there, if that makes you feel better. He doesn’t show up in court records, either.”

I haven’t told her this, but I plan to check death records next. I don’t think it’s occurred to Win that Thane might have left this world without telling her.

“What are you going to paint?”

“Death. What else?” She glances at me. “Don’t peek.”

Instead, I catalog her. Her wrists are so fragile that the skin stretches tight over the bones; her complexion is ashy, her fingernails jaundiced. But her eyes are brighter than they’ve been in a week, darting from her palette to the painting and back again. There’s something almost mystical about her looking at a blank canvas and seeing something that nobody else can, yet. I suppose it’s not that different from peering over the edge of this world into the next.

Suddenly we hear the front door open, and Felix’s voice calling for Win. “In here,” she says, and his face peeks into the dining room.

His eyes are drawn immediately to his wife. “Look at you! I can’t remember the last time I saw you painting.” He kisses the top of her head. She tilts her face toward him, a cat stretching toward the sun. “Do you know how many Loew-Cornell brushes I’ve put in her Christmas stocking that she’s never used?” he says to me. “You’re a miracle worker.”

Win meets my gaze, our secret held between us. “Isn’t she, though?”

Felix cannot stop touching Win. His hand lights on her arm, her neck, between the wings of her shoulder blades. He has no idea that Win’s animation is due to the fact that she is tying the last bow of her life with a note to someone she loved more than him.

“Could I ask you a favor, honey?” Win says. “I have a crazy craving for buttermilk biscuits. But we don’t have any buttermilk.”

Felix blinks, stunned. We both know how long it’s been since Win finished a meal, much less asked for a specific one. “Coming right up,” he says. “I’ll even bake them from scratch.” Over Win’s head, he nods toward the hallway, a silent request for a private moment with me. I follow him out of the dining room.

“I know it’s not likely, but doesn’t she seem like she’s rallying? I mean, people prove doctors wrong all the time—”

“Felix,” I warn him. “Don’t go down that path. Win’s terminal. What you’re seeing is something that happens a lot, just before death. There’s like a power burst or something. I don’t know how long it will last. But it won’t be permanent.” I hesitate. “I’m sorry.”

“Right. Okay.” He rubs the back of his neck. “I guess I’d better get the buttermilk fast, then.”

By the time I return to the dining room, I’m angry at Win. For putting me into this position; for putting Felix second, when he so clearly idolizes her. For making me think that Brian is right—I shouldn’t be aiding and abetting this betrayal. “Do you see how much that man adores you?”

Win nods. “I always have.”

“Don’t you feel like you’re cheating on him?”

She doesn’t even falter. “There are times I wonder if my whole marriage has been me cheating on Thane. If that was the life I was supposed to have.” Win looks at me over the lip of the canvas. “I belonged with him long before I belonged with Felix. I’m not saying that I couldn’t love two men. Just that if I’d stayed with Thane, there wouldn’t have been a space in me to fill with Felix.”

I sink down into a chair opposite from the back of her easel. She has turned my thinking on end. Felix was the one she ended up with…but he wasn’t where she started.

“I can’t stop thinking about it,” Win continues. “Who I might have been, if I’d fought for Thane. An artist, maybe even a good one. A mother, definitely. But would I have moved to France? Would my son have lived? Would I have cancer? What if that one decision set off a whole chain of other forks in the path?”

I think of Brian’s multiverses. “Even if Thane gets your letter…you’re never going to know the answers.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t wonder,” Win says.

“It also doesn’t mean that this life wasn’t the best one. The one you were supposed to have.”

“Do you believe that?” she asks, putting down her brush. “That I deserve cancer?”

“That’s not what I’m saying—”

“I don’t think I do,” Win continues. “I don’t think anyone does. I think life is a roll of a die. I got a one, I could have gotten a six. It is what it is. But it isn’t destiny. It isn’t determined by three old witches snipping a thread at the minute you’re born. Not cancer, not my profession, not even who I love. The real question is whether I’d still be sitting here, dying, if I’d made different choices.” She looks at me. “Do you think that no matter what, everything you’ve done in the past, every decision you’ve made, would still have led you to this room, this discussion, this moment?”

“Yes,” I say. “Probably.”

Win laughs. “Those are two different answers. Besides, I can prove I’m right.”

“How?”

“Close your eyes. Now picture the person you thought you’d wind up with.”

I can see him as if he’s standing in front of me. Drinking from a water bottle, his head tipped back, his throat working. His smile, when he catches me staring.

“You can ask that of anyone, and they always have someone in mind. Always. And here’s the thing, Dawn—it’s rarely the person they’re going home to that night.”

I imagine our legs tangled in the cooling sand, his hand a star on the small of my back.

Win raises her brows. “I knew it. Who is he?”

“Someone I knew in grad school,” I say softly.

“You aren’t in touch?”

“No.”

“But you still think about him.” A statement, not a question.

“Not very often,” I tell Win. “Not until you told me about Thane.”

She smiles. “Well, well, well. Methinks the doula doth protest too much.”

“I’m happily married,” I remind her.

“So am I.” She starts to paint again. “So…why did it end?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Yeah, right,” Win says. “You could probably tell me in excruciating detail the last conversation you two had.” She dips her brush into the blue, and then into the red, and makes a small purple heart on her palette. A medal for courage.

“Why did you wait so long to find Thane, if you never stopped loving him?”

“Because I also never stopped loving Felix,” Win says simply. “And women don’t get to have midlife crises where they run off to find themselves.”

I consider this—how many husbands have walked out in pursuit of some elusive happiness. Men leave their wives and children behind every day, and no one is shocked. It’s as if that Y chromosome they hold entitles them to self-discovery, to reinvention.

Was that how Brian felt? I wonder. With Gita? It makes me feel unsteady. Brian has always been home base, my anchor, the knight who rescued me. To think of him faltering is to imagine the earth veering from orbit, the seasons reversing. What if he, like me, made the assumption that we were forever—but couldn’t help his thoughts from straying to someone else. If love is, as Win said, just chance, then the only way to feel secure is to never pick up the die again after that first roll.

Brian was my second roll.

Felix comes back with buttermilk, and soon the house is filled with the scent of baking. He brings us a plate, biscuits still steaming, honey on the side. Win eats two, and after Felix goes to wash the dishes, she picks up the thread of the conversation. “It’s okay, you know.”

“What is?”

“To admit that you think about it. Where you might be now, and with whom. What if. It’s not being unfaithful. It’s not even saying that you wouldn’t make the same choice, if you had to do it over again. It’s just…”

I meet her gaze. “Part of life,” I finish.

“Part of life,” Win repeats.

She taps her fingertip against the center of the canvas. “Acrylics dry fast,” she says, satisfied, and turns the painting toward me.

Her portrait of death lives in shadows. It’s midnight blue and dusky violet and violent black, but if you stare at it hard enough, you can make out two faint profiles, a breath apart, unable to complete that kiss for eternity.

“Now,” she explains, “we take it off the stretcher bars.” She reaches for a tool in her fishing box, a staple remover, and starts to pluck out the fastenings that hold the canvas stretched tight. One end begins to curl like an eyelash.

“You’re going to ruin the painting!”

“What painting?” Win replies calmly. By now the canvas is a coil of color, a scroll of pigment. She turns it over. “All I see is a piece of stationery for a letter I need to write.”

* * *

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