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morning coffee. As if needing reassurance of his presence. Now she flinched at every touch. The sheets are rough, she said. He replaced them with high thread-count brushed egyptian cotton. He replaced them himself because he’d dismissed all the help except the private nurse a week ago. He replaced them every day because she broke a fever every night.
    He kept the room heat high because she said that she was always cold. She drank liter after liter of water and sweated constantly. Nauseated and no appetite. The bones emerging in her face and her color bad. She’d lost twentyeight pounds since the CAT scan and hadn’t had them to spare to begin with. Often she made noises that made Niko think that she was having nightmares and he’d lean across the bed to reassure her and she’d be awake. Had been awake for hours. Sensitive to everything. Water was freezing and tepid teas scalded. The room too bright and her bedclothes bunched and his footsteps loud on the deep pile carpet. Her world burning brighter even as it waned.
    Niko kept his vigil by her bed and talked to her. She’d grown short of breath and did not talk much. Short tired sentences often trailing off as medications claimed them. He talked about their lives together and adventures they had had. Would have. The great good fortune of their lives, of being alive. News of the world, their friends, their industry. He tried to keep it light but every word felt like goodbye. He called her father and held the phone against her ear and she said a few words but mostly listened. Hank a brokenhearted bear who had been nothing but kind to Niko despite all that Niko’d put his daughter through. Tolerant and forgiving and firm and stern when need demanded. His wife dead of pancreatic cancer these eight years. The man made smaller in the years since then. Tentative. Aware that everything valuable can be broken. Will be broken.
    She called friends and spoke to them through him. She’d been texting them but that had dwindled. Some came to visit though he discouraged this. The great unspoken in their eyes. She didn’t need to see that. When the reporters started calling he stopped answering his phone.
    He helped her to the bathroom while she still felt good enough to walk and changed her bedpan after she did not. He changed IV bags and swabbed insertion sites and gave meds as the nurse had shown him. The litany of medications now well known to him and only palliative. A month ago it had been Tylenol for headaches and chronic fever and joint pain. The headaches became migraines which had led to Imitrex. The joint pain became general which led to Lyrica. Shortness of breath and chest pain led to asthma inhalers which did nothing. Reglan for nausea. Her skin began to hurt and sometimes even burn. She spiked fevers several times a day and soaked the sheets with night sweats. She became dehydrated and had no appetite. IV glucose and fluids, Vicodin and then Percoset for pain. Marinol briefly to horrible effect, hallucinations and panic. Now it was morphine and nowhere left to go.
    He did everything he could to be with her and make her comfortable, and conducted his researches and arrangements while she slept. Phone calls and emails and websites and rare books. Fed Ex packages delivered through discreet third parties. Notes and diagrams and incantations. He became disturbed by how familiar all these preparations felt. Keys and summonings, abjurations and imprecations. Icons and dead languages. Things he’d never been exposed to in this life and could not have known. Yet know them he did. He did not learn so much as remember. As if the more he dug the more some tiered self surfaced like recovered strata of despoiled Troy.
    He worked in the study and left the intercom on in case she called out and kept his cellphone near to hand in case she texted him. Sometimes that was easier for her than talking. Her voice the first thing he had loved about her. Wise beyond its years and freighted