Joining my palms, fingers threaded together and numb, I say, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t come yesterday.” His face is pale, he doesn’t reply. Features grim, eyes wide, I start to cry. A tear hits his cheek. I want him to flinch, to yell at me and call me an idiot again.

He doesn’t.

Fist to his chest, head to his heart, I echo the words once more, “Come back. Come back.” But his reply is the same—silence, footsteps shuffling behind me, whispers asking questions, asking, Who is she?

I am everything you couldn’t be, I think while looking to the one who killed him twice. I am the woman who bears his child in me. I am the one to whom he left his legacy.

I am offered three hands. “We need to close the casket,” they say. “It’s been three hours,” they say.

I nod. I pretend to sob. The feel of his costume is replaced by the leather handbag I carried during our meetings, secret and raw, pushed to nothing no more.

The lady in white, his much-hated wife, scoffs at my socks; looks down, never up, at me. And then it takes over, a fine rage fuelled by absence, as I reach into leather, pull out a fine blade once sharp; now deadly.

“Stop. Stop. Stop!”

She screams.

It is too late. In the handle, in my palm, her pulse fades. From the crowd, a man steps forward and shouts as if he cares. I don’t remember him from the family portraits.

He drops his umbrella, his cane. He runs, his hand, becoming a fist that collides with my jaw, leaving me sore, to bleed mountains of gore.

My ear pressed to the church’s red tiled floor, “Who is she?” is the last I hear before I see him, again.