The Fox at the Window

The funeral was her idea. Of course it was. Always the dramatic one, even when the rest of us were too tired to feel anything.

I stood by the grave in my black hat, sensible and inappropriate at once, watching her toss red roses onto the casket like she was scattering confetti at a wedding she'd never wanted to attend. The irony would have made him laugh.

"You look like a zombie," she said, appearing beside me. Her hair was longer than I remembered, wilder. Fox-colored. "You've looked like one since the diagnosis."

"I'm fine," I said, because that's what you say.

"He was my friend too," she said. "But you, you were his wife. You were supposed to save him."

The accusation hung between us, sharp and real. We had both failed him in different ways. She by leaving when things got hard. Me by staying and watching him disappear, piece by piece, until the man in the hospice bed was more memory than flesh.

"I saw a fox this morning," she said suddenly, tears finally coming. "In the garden. Just sitting there, watching me. Bold as anything. He would have loved that."

I remembered then—how he'd wanted to see a fox in the wild before he died. How we'd driven to the countryside three weekends in a row, searching, until he was too weak to leave the house. The day before the stroke, he'd told me he'd seen one from the window. I'd assumed it was the morphine talking.

Maybe it wasn't.

"He saw one too," I said. "The day before—the last good day. He watched it from the bedroom window."

She looked at me then, really looked, and something softened between us. Not forgiveness—too late for that—but something like shared understanding. Two failures standing in a graveyard, connected by a fox we'd never seen and the man who had loved us both, in his way.

"He'd hate this hat," I said, and she laughed, wet and broken.

"He really would."