But something went out.

I do not know how else to describe it. Something that had been present in Valerie when Gordon was alive, some quality of forward orientation, of being aimed at what was coming, went out after he died, and what remained was a woman who managed the present with great competence and had stopped looking ahead. She turned down trips she would previously have taken. She declined invitations from friends, not unkindly, but consistently. She filled her days with purpose, her garden and her book group and the volunteer work she had always done at the local library, but the days felt, when you were around her, like days that were being gotten through rather than lived.

Owen worried about this.

He worried in the way he worried about things he could not fix, which was quietly and without resolution, the worry sitting in him like a low-grade background process.

The vacation was his idea, though he did not present it as an intervention.

We went to the coast of North Carolina, to a hotel on the Outer Banks that was not fancy but was good, with a long porch that faced the ocean and a bar at the ground level that served local seafood and wine. We had been there once before, Owen and I, in the early years of our marriage when we were still discovering which places would become ours, and we had decided it was a place we would return to and then had not returned until now.

Valerie came because we asked her and because she had not been to the beach in three years and because Owen had asked with the specific quality of asking that she had never been able to decline, which was not manipulation but simply the particular frequency of her son’s genuine need for her company.

The first two days were good in the uncomplicated way of beach days, sun and ocean and the particular decompression that saltwater and distance from ordinary life produce. Valerie read on the porch. She walked with Owen in the mornings. She came to dinner with us in the evenings and ate well and talked about things she had read and things she was thinking about and seemed, for the first time in two years, to be looking at what was in front of her with something that resembled interest in tomorrow.

On the second evening, while Owen was showering and I was on the porch reading, Valerie went downstairs to the bar.

She went for a glass of wine and a change of scene, which she mentioned to me as she passed, and I noted the ease of it, the small autonomous decision to go somewhere alone, which was different from the Valerie of the past two years who had been declining small autonomous decisions in favor of the contained safety of the familiar.

She met Russell at the bar.