Mimi kisses Walter tentatively on the mouth.

She has never kissed a dead person. Kissing Walter when he was alive was so much different—urgent, never-ending. They walked away from their previous partners joined at the lips, as she often put it. Now he’s cold and her lips quiver. “They’re coming to take you away from me, my sweet,” she whispers, pulling her nightgown tightly around her, the nightgown he gave her for her last birthday. He loved her in blue.

The 911 dispatcher wasn’t lying when she said help was on the way. The ambulance roars to a stop outside, blocking the driveway as if anyone is about to go anywhere. Then a police car. Uniforms rush past her and surround Walter’s lifeless body. A man in plain clothes gestures her to follow him to a corner of the room.

They know she did it—who else would it be? The gun lies right next to dead Walter, her fingerprints all over it, and she’s not keening like a typical murder victim’s wife would. “We were happy,” she says woodenly. “Then he got cancer. The bad kind.”

The plainclothes detective scribbles feverishly; stops; reads her, her Miranda rights; scribbles again.

“And I know he didn’t want to die in agony,” she insists. “He never said it in so many words, but he never criticized others who did the same thing. ‘They didn’t want to be a burden,’ he’d said.”

And so she’s standing in the middle of their shared bedroom in her blue nightgown, knowing in her heart that she did what he wanted even though he never said it. He knew she loved him and would do the right thing.