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months since she was assumed to have drowned. Her portrait still plastered the press. As unremarkable as she looked in her gown and cap, was there any possibility of him recognizing her? I held my breath.
    “Darling,” she said, “pass me the magazine. Wasn’t she beautiful? I’d like you to make me look more like her. Can it be done?”
    The surgeon barely looked at the magazine. He said, “Such a tragedy. Such a beautiful woman. Now what I’d suggest for you, if I may, is that we streamline a little here, and here, and take the nostrils to there. I think you’re going to love the result.”
    She acquiesced by little more than a murmur and he began marking her face with his pen. I sat by her side, in the role of husband, I suppose. The surgeon must see them every week. A husband taking his wife on a nip-and-tuck holiday in Brazil, a couple of weeks on the beach thrown in to recover, before returning home remarkably “refreshed.”
    Still, I was nervous, I must admit, in a way that I had not been since she was officially deceased. When I returned to visit her in the morning I stood for a full five minutes on the hospital steps holding myself up on a railing while my legs did their best to let me down. I am ashamed to recall that my fear was as much for myself as for her, and that as I trembled at the prospect of discovery I had in mind my own inevitable disgrace perhaps more than anything else.
    I pulled myself together. For an instant I wished I could be felled right there and then, a sudden blood clot in the brain to trump the tumor, no more tightening and loosening of the hangman’s noose, no more service to him, to her, to anything, anyone. And then I pulled myself together, called upon my birthright as an Englishman, a stiffening of the upper lip drafted in like the Household Guards to quell an uprising of the emotions.
    I nearly laughed when I saw her, sitting on the bed, painting her toenails. With two black eyes, a bandaged nose, and swollen face I could barely recognize her myself. “I’m a mess,” she said. “And the nurses think I’m just some rich spoiled wife who has nothing better to do than chop a perfectly good nose around.” She sounded petulant.
    I took her home two days later. The drive was long and, again, silent. I made some dinner, or rather, heated two plastic trays in the microwave, while she lay on the sofa beneath a blanket, only the crown of her head and two punched-up eyes revealed. For the next few days her mood was as somber as I have ever witnessed. Not distraught, not hysterical, and not punctuated by those rays of light with which she pierced even the blackest of her moods. She was absorbing, I think, the realization that she will not be recognized, not by the neighbors, the shopkeepers, the nurses, or anyone else. When she goes out now she may take all the precautions she pleases, in the way she dresses, the way she speaks, what she says, but the drama will be limited to the scenarios playing out in her mind. Her outings will not be adrenaline-filled. The curtain has fallen. The soap opera has been axed. And so here starts the rest of her life.

Chapter Five
    Although she wasn’t supposed to work the weekends Lydia liked to drop in on Saturday mornings because Saturdays were when families came to look for a new pet, meaning there were fewer staff available to exercise and care for the dogs. She pulled up in front of the prefabricated office and opened the passenger door to let Rufus bounce down ahead of her.
    Esther was in the clinic with the Kerry blue terrier puppy they’d taken in a few days earlier. “This one,” she said, “will not take his worming pills. Eric’s been mixing them in his food but he finds them and spits them out.”
    “He’s a smart cookie,” said Lydia.
    “With a sore backside to prove it.”
    Lydia stroked the puppy’s wavy black coat. It wouldn’t turn that lovely slate blue for another few months yet. She ran her hand over his little beard.