POV: CHASE
Dominic dies on a Tuesday morning at four-seventeen, which is the specific hour that Helena documented in her journals as the hour when the boundary between things is thinnest, the liminal hour, and I don't know if the dying at four-seventeen is coincidence or the universe completing a pattern with the specific care of something that has been building for twenty-six years.
I am there. This is the important fact, that I am there, not because I planned to be there at the specific moment but because the three visits had become four and then five and the five had produced a quality in the hospital room that I was not ready to step away from, the specific quality of time being limited in the way that time is limited when you are watching someone at the end of their available time and you understand the watching to be irreplaceable.
