It is morning when she finds the note. Her time—the morning—with the blinds still drawn and nothing but the heater, the refrigerator striking their electric chords. Theirs is a house so quiet, she walks on her toes for another cup of coffee.

She sips as she reads, and for a while, there is no noise outside either. Not the yowling she’d heard last night, the indistinguishable violence-affection of sharp-boned alley cats that hide now in the gathering light. Beneath houses and cars, their feline eyes not glowing but dull shining as they lick their wounds to pitiful baldness. Nor are there those prowler sounds that live in dark—the rattle of a gate chain you imagine is not as strong as it looks, the flap of a loose screen. Only the wind, you tell no one but yourself because it is only you who is afraid. There is none of this in the morning pitched too early or too late.

Hours pass. The coffee is nearly gone before she hears cars on the nearby highway like a strong wind blowing but elsewhere. She cocoons herself in a nubby sweater, brings the book closer to her nose as if the shrinking she feels is a dwindling of actual space and not instant. Without looking she knows when the school bus lurches down the street. There’s a part of her mind that’s like a room in a house where no one goes because someone died there once many years ago. And so it is amidst covered mirrors and stopped clocks that she senses more than thinks of moon-faced children.

The book she reads is one of her favorites, and perhaps this is why she thumbs through the remaining pages—to measure what joy is left. The words are familiar, but there are less she doesn’t know. Just seventeen when she’d read it the first time, a summer she remembers as hot and slow before time and all its meanings caught up to her. She’d taken the book when she left her child home, always intending but never actually reading it a second time before it disappeared to some crevice even Saint Anthony couldn’t discern.

Now the copy she reads belongs to her husband.

In the beginning, they were reassured by the smallest things, the minutia of their semblance. What is a sign of compatibility if not the same coffeepot, the same albums, the same books on shelves? How else to navigate fate save matching of spades? In her house for the first time that afternoon, another summer blistering, he’d been the one to finger a known spine, to say the words while standing not kneeling, so even at the proposal they faced each other as equals.

She’d moved in with him, hung his house with the flowers of their ceremony—a thousand white roses drawn in upturned bouquets that lost their scent to shriveled perpetuity. And those duplicate possessions by which they’d mapped their course, she arranged side-by-side jokingly at first and then with the solemnity that exemplifies proof’s collector. A hall of reflections it was, his house and her house now too, and in the decades since they must have clung to some corner of that looking glass so that in one, the other could be seen, and in these last years, people will often mistake them for brother and sister.

The turning of pages bares a note wedged in the book’s cleft, a habit she’s developed herself to compensate a waning memory—grocery lists or the time of another doctor’s appointment scribbled and then filed away, ill-placed by her own mechanical hands. She’s learned to do most everything without thinking.

So long now since she’d first settled her things amongst his. They’d set about the garden soon after, planting lavender and cacti and a willow in front. They meant to stay those nights they sat on the porch with dirty fingernails, dirty knees, admiring only what they could foster. They gulped drinks mixed too strong for their sunburns, and before all that earth turned raw, they told stories they hadn’t intended. They were still young then, their separate histories too brief for allotment of epoch and era. Grappling, they found nothing but love to measure those years before they’d met.

Even so, they spoke with caution, rendering those who’d come before in diminutive hindsight. A mean necessity to trace one’s lineage through old lovers, portraits distilled to ailment and affliction because they were that careful in the telling. Like true misers, they’d kept all the goodness for themselves for surely there was something fine in all that misery.

She wrenches the paper scrap from where it sticks to the binding. The note is yellow at the edges and nothing any mistress would leave, and besides, they are too old now. Their gardens long overtaken by weeds and cheat grass, she has passed to the youth that heirloom of adultery.

Too brief to be called a letter and yet the husband is addressed not only by first name but as well the last, that chain of script all three of them shared as some families do. A testament of affection with no signature, no pierced heart—only a certain letter circled in the last word. Maybe the first letter of the first wife’s first name, though the second wife can’t recall this penny in the well of things she’s surrendered.

The light is coming on strong now illuminating even the blinded house. In the bedroom, the husband begins to snore, his lungs thick with illness, more awake than he had been minutes ago. She knows the current of his slumber, the way he sinks and rises by degrees just as she knows that one day, she’ll be left waiting for him on this side of wakefulness.

He’s settled into the docile satisfaction of disease, and maybe it is her own relative health that robs her of this final sameness. That which is his content acceptance, she can only refract as urgent desperation. She is mad with the numbering of days left, and if they were once selfish by design, she is even more so now as her own memories dissolve. Anymore, there are none so solid as the note she holds.

There have been good times for sure, the husband is fond of saying since his hair turned silver. And though she must have realized that some of those good times happened before her, without her, it was nothing she’d needed to know until now.

Not to be finished a second time, the book lies open on the kitchen table. Her place lost in the pages that turn without agent or perhaps by some everlasting hand. It would have been just like this then, only on the floor beside a couch or a bed, the husband partial to such comfort. She sees his arm drifting in reader’s sleep. His fingers twitch and loosen one by one until the book falls, and maybe this is what his first wife hears. It’s the crack of the spine that stirs her from wherever. She’ll not wake him as she tiptoes for the pencil, the paper she folds between these pages to be forgotten or else remembered as something special.

It’s a worn path she traces, settling into bed beside the waking husband. She touches his brow split by pale scar, creased as the found note. Strange, she thinks, what outlasts us in the end—the tracks of old wounds, chapters left unread.