He told her on a Tuesday, at breakfast, in the middle of a conversation about roofing slate.
"It's two," Thomas said. "It's been two since the council meeting about the school. I didn't say anything at the time because Cecily was finally asking for what she needed and I wasn't going to make that room about me."
Victoria set down her bread. She did not, he noticed, reach for the phone or ask to see it, which two years ago she would have done immediately.
"All right," she said.
"That's it? All right?"
"You told me. That was the agreement — that I'd hear it, not that I'd have a plan for it." She resumed eating, deliberately, and Thomas recognized the deliberateness for what it was. "I'm not going to do arithmetic at you, Thomas. I promised myself I'd stop and I've mostly managed it and I'd rather not start again over breakfast."
They ate in silence for a while.
"I'd like to say a thing," she said eventually. "It's not comforting and I've been carrying it about six weeks, and I've decided I'd rather say it badly than not say it."
"Go on."
"I've started noticing that I'm going to be all right." Victoria's voice was perfectly level and her hands were not. "Not now. After. I've watched myself over the last year — running the council, arguing about the Codex, making Cecily take herself seriously — and I've noticed that I'm competent and busy and that the days have a shape to them that doesn't actually require you in it. And I've been horrified by that, Thomas. I've felt like I was rehearsing widowhood and finding it survivable and that this was some kind of betrayal."
Thomas found he could not immediately speak.
"And then I thought about it properly," she went on, "and I realized it's not a betrayal at all. It's the thing you've spent seven years building on purpose. You wrote a succession document. You handed the school to Cecily. You've spent this entire time making yourself unnecessary and I've been treating my own resilience as a moral failing when it's actually your work succeeding."
"Victoria—"
"I'm not finished, and if I stop I won't start again." She looked up. "So I want to say plainly: I am going to be all right. Eventually. And that is not the same as being fine, and it is not the same as wanting this, and it does not mean I love you any less than a woman who would fall apart would love you. It means you built something that holds. I'd rather you knew that while you're here to know it than have it be a thing I work out alone afterward."
Thomas got up, went round the table, and knelt down beside her chair, which was awkward and undignified and made his own knees complain in a way that would have amused Wat enormously.
"That's the best thing anyone has ever said to me," he said.
"It's a horrible thing to say to someone."
"It's both." He took her hands. "Do you know what I've actually been frightened of? Not dying. Not the number. I've been frightened that the whole of it — the valley, the Codex, all of it — was really just an enormously elaborate way of arranging not to be forgotten, and that meant it was fundamentally selfish and I'd been lying to myself for seven years about why I was doing any of it."
"And?"
"And you just told me the thing I built works, and that its working costs me the one comfort a selfish man would actually want, which is to be irreplaceable." He was aware his eyes were wet and did not particularly care. "If I'd built it for the reason I was afraid of, I'd have hated what you just said. I don't. I've never been more relieved by anything."
Victoria put her hand on the side of his face.
"You are," she said, "a deeply strange person, and I've never once regretted marrying you, and if you don't get up off that floor your knees will lock and I'll have to fetch Wat, who will never let either of us forget it."
He got up.
They finished breakfast, and talked about roofing slate, and it was, in the ordinary way of the best days, entirely unremarkable.