My mind flashed backward five years to a hospital room with soft yellow light and the smell of antiseptic and Warren lying propped against pillows, thinner than I had ever seen him, yet still somehow radiating the practical steadiness that defined him. His heart had been failing by then. We both knew it, though we still spoke in euphemisms because the truth sat too large in the room to be named every minute. He had squeezed my hand with surprising strength and said, “Nora, promise me something. Protect yourself from everyone. Not just strangers. Everybody. Money changes people. Sometimes even the people we think it won’t.”
I had protested at the time. “Not Desmond.”
Warren had looked at me in that painfully loving way spouses sometimes do when one of them knows the other is still trying to negotiate with reality. “I hope not. But hope isn’t a plan.”