---
1. The Hospice Bed
It arrived on a Tuesday.
A monstrous thing, all levers and rails, taking up half their bedroom. The delivery men moved with practiced indifference, assembling it in minutes while Noah stood numb in the doorway.
Lena watched from the couch, her fingers worrying the frayed edge of her sweater. "It's smaller than I imagined," she lied.
Noah helped her into it that night—the first time, though neither of them said so. Her body had become a collection of sharp angles and birdlike bones, her pajamas swallowing her whole. When he adjusted the pillows, his hand brushed the back of her head and came away with strands of her hair clinging to his fingers like cobwebs.
Lena pretended not to notice. Noah pretended not to cry.
---
2. The Last Real Conversation
It happened at 3:17 AM, when the pain meds had worn off just enough for clarity.
"Noah." Her voice was a dry leaf rustling. "We need to talk."
He knew what she meant. He'd been dreading it for months.
Noah climbed into the bed beside her, careful of the tubes, and gathered her against his chest. Her heartbeat fluttered against his palm like a dying moth.
"Tell me," he whispered.
Lena spoke slowly, her words thickened by medication but painfully lucid:
- No more hospitals.
- When it happens, let it be here, in our bed.
- Promise you won't watch. (He couldn't promise this.)
- Promise you'll live. (He couldn't promise this either.)
When she finished, Noah pressed his forehead to hers and breathed her in—the scent of her fading beneath the antiseptic and sickness.
"I'll find you again," he choked out. "In every lifetime."
Lena smiled. "Look for me in bookstores and bad weather."
---
3. The Silence After
The next morning, Lena stopped forming complete sentences.
Her words came in fragments, half-thoughts that dissolved mid-breath. Sometimes she spoke to people who weren't there—her long-dead mother, a childhood friend, the boy who'd broken her heart in tenth grade. Once, she had a twenty-minute conversation with the ghost of Virginia Woolf.
Noah sat vigil, translating her murmurs, brushing the hair from her fever-damp forehead. When she called him by the wrong name, he corrected her gently. When she forgot who he was entirely, he pretended it didn't shred him.
The hospice nurse called it "terminal restlessness." Noah called it torture.
---
4. The Final Coherence
For one miraculous hour on the fourth day, the fog lifted.
Lena's eyes focused. Her hand found Noah's.
"Did we—" She licked cracked lips. "Did we love well?"
Noah brought her fingers to his mouth, salt and iron on his tongue. "Better than anyone."
Lena sighed, content. Then, with sudden urgency: "The notebook. Under the bed."
Noah retrieved it—the same one she'd used for her bucket list. The last page was new, dated that morning in shaky script:
For Noah:
- Water the ferns
- Re-read our favorite poems
- Forgive yourself
- Live so loudly it drowns out the silence I left
Underneath, a final line nearly illegible:
You were my favorite everything.
When Noah looked up, Lena was gone again—slipped back into the haze.
---
5. The Last Breath
It came on a Thursday. Rain tapped against the window like impatient fingers.
Noah was dozing in the chair beside her when he felt it—a change in the air. The absence of something vital.
Lena's chest simply... stopped rising.
No one tells you how obvious death is. How fundamentally different a body becomes the moment life leaves it. Noah knew before he checked for a pulse, before he called the nurse, before the official pronouncement.
His first thought was absurd: She'll be cold.
His second: I want to die too.
Noah climbed into the bed and gathered her against him, pressing his lips to her still-warm forehead. He stayed there for hours, until her skin cooled, until the rain stopped, until the first terrible sunrise of a world without her.
---
6. The Aftermath
The funeral home took her body at noon.
Noah stood in the empty apartment, staring at the indent her head had left on the pillow. The hospice bed was already gone—stripped, sanitized, returned like some macabre rental.
On the nightstand:
- A half-empty water glass with her lipstick stain
- The notebook, open to her last words
- A single strand of her hair clinging to the wood
Noah sank to his knees and screamed until his voice gave out.