The room.
The hotel-room, lamp-lit, nobody-in-it quality of the room without him.
The air — settling. The way air settles after a significant presence has been removed. The recalibrating quality of a room finding its own temperature again.
She lay there.
The sheets warm and wet around her. The ceiling above her. The lamp to her left, casting its amber, unchanged, indifferent quality of light.
She didn't move.
For a long moment she just — lay there. The what-just-happened quality of not moving. Her body in the state it was in. Her mind in the state it was in — which was to say: a state.
The tears.
They came without deciding to come.
The thin, continuous, sideways-running quality of them — from the corners of her eyes, down her temples, disappearing into her hair. Not the sobbing kind. Not the wailing quality of the hospital corridor floor. The quiet, my-eyes-are-running kind. The kind that arrived because the body needed to release something and had found the available path.
