“Where’s your husband?” he asked, abruptly.

“How…?” she began and then stopped, following his look towards her hand. Janet steeled herself to utter the word. Gazing directly across the table she blurted: “Dead.” She paused and then said: “He’s dead.” She’d confronted it before, of course: to herself at first, staring into mirrors in their empty apartment, needing to convince herself it was true and not a bad dream, saying: “Dead, dead, dead… Hank’s dead,” but this was the first time to a complete stranger. Something else that did not hurt as much as she’d expected.

Janet waited for an insincere “I’m sorry,” but instead he said: “How long?”

This was going beyond anything for which Janet had prepared herself. Clip-voiced, gazing down into her untouched drink, she said: “Ten months… ten months and two weeks…” There was another pause. “… And four days. It was a Friday.”

“How did he die?”

Janet swallowed, deeply, and said: “I don’t think I want to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged, lost. She said: “I just don’t.”

“You should,” he said.

Suddenly angry, Janet said: “Don’t give me any of that ‘you’ll feel better if you talk about it’ amateur psychology…” She leveled her hand beneath her chin. “I’ve had that sort of crap up to here!”

“I wasn’t going to give you any sort of amateur psychology crap.”

Deflated, Janet demanded: “What then?”

Now he shrugged. “It just seems odd that if you loved a guy that much you want to lock everything away. You might as well take the rings off and pretend it never happened.”

“It’s not like that at all!” she said, still angry.

“If you say so.”

“What sort of remark is that!”

“A backing-off sort of remark,” he said. “I was out of order and now I’m embarrassed. Would you like another drink?”