The Morning After

Margaret stood in her husband's home office at 3 AM, feeling like the cheapest kind of spy. Tom's phone was unlocked on his desk—careless, unlike him—and she'd already scrolled through three months of texts before she could stop herself. What she found wasn't another woman. It was something worse.

A text from two weeks ago: 'Got the results. They're not wrong. Start the vitamin D protocol immediately. The specialist at Northwestern thinks you have 18 months, maybe 24 if you're aggressive about treatment.'

Margaret's hands trembled as she remembered the abandoned glass of orange juice on his nightstand each morning, how he'd started taking those handful of supplements with breakfast, how he'd stopped complaining about her buying the expensive organic oranges from the farmer's market. He'd been weaving his sickness into the fabric of their domestic life like someone practicing for an absence they'd already accepted.

She thought of the past year—his new obsession with planning their retirement, the way he'd started teaching her to manage their finances alone, how he'd gently discouraged her from booking trips beyond 2026. She'd assumed it was midlife crisis, the usual male grappling with mortality.

Now she understood. He wasn't afraid of dying. He was afraid of her not knowing how to live without him.

The office door creaked open. Tom stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the hallway light. He didn't look surprised. He'd probably expected this moment, had perhaps even left the phone unlocked hoping she'd find out before he had to form the words himself.

'I was going to tell you after the second opinion,' he said softly. 'I didn't want you to watch me die before I was actually dying.'

Margaret crossed the room and wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his shoulder. She could smell the citrus scent on his skin from his morning ritual—that glass of orange juice he drank like medicine now.

'You idiot,' she whispered. 'You thought I'd rather discover it alone in the dark than face it together in the light?'

He laughed, a broken sound, and held her tighter. 'It seemed kinder at the time.'

'Nothing about this is kind,' she said. 'But we're going to be kind to each other. Starting right now.'

She led him back to bed, where they lay tangled together until dawn, watching the morning light turn their bedroom the color of the oranges on their kitchen counter—sweet, fleeting, and impossibly bright.