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He could not be dead. His pillow was still warm.

At least it felt warm when she touched it. Perhaps it was her hand that conveyed the heat, playing tricks on her mind. Cruel tricks indeed. Would Christ have meant this type of offense when he said, “And if thy hand offend thee, cut if off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched.”

Cutting off her hand would not bring her husband back. And it certainly would not keep her from God’s judgment.

Still, it was insanely difficult to remember that he was gone. Elizabeth had to remind herself. She could hear his voice. Fragments of sounds from a lifetime together: his footsteps at the door. The snuffling throaty sound he made as he fell asleep. The smell of his hands after a day’s work, lampblack ink-stained, sooty like a chimney but with a varnish scent of fine furniture. His breath—warm and sticky, a curious mixture of garlic, onion and the milk-fed breath of an infant in the morning. The extrication of a soul is a messy, surgical procedure done unceremoniously over time. It is the result of layers of scars, of gouging out memories and cutting away nuances. No, he would not be truly dead to her for quite some painful time.

Elizabeth stood at the window and watched a cold rain slide down the windowpane, thickly, as if it were clear molasses. The crisp, cool, pleasant weather of Lewis’s funeral yesterday had finally, inevitably succumbed to a late December winter in the colony. The end of one thing heralds the beginning of another, she tried to console herself.

The service had been attended by great numbers, though, and most likely would have been greatly attended even in this dismal squall. Her husband had been well-liked, respected, even though he had been a Charles-Town resident for only a few short years. A tribute to their open hearts, and Lewis’s reputation as a good man of business and a right proper friend.

That burying business taken care of, however, Elizabeth should be hurrying out, just now. She was already late opening the shop. Past deadline, and she was a punctual person. But immobility gripped her, and a desperate want to just stay at the window, here in the relative warmth, and spend the day watching millions of small drops being pelleted by more drops, knocked loose from their comfortable spots and sent sliding into each other, sometimes rushing all the way to the bottom and back into the earth. She drew up a chair, and sat heavily in it, unblinking. Puddles pooled; the packed ground softening like an unfired brick not yet ready for the kiln.

It would be a muddy walk to the grave site this afternoon. Her hem would take the worst of it.