There was a drawer in the dresser. It was small and white with fine gold trim. It had a brass handle. It had a small keyhole. She looked at it all the time while she cried. I watched her from the window, unable to speak.

The key to the drawer was under the four-poster bed we'd bought twelve years ago. It was secreted in the depression made by the foot of the bottom-left bedpost. I knew this, and I knew that she did not.

I gave up trying to speak to her an eternity ago, if you can call two days an eternity. Two days spent silently watching the love of your life suffer, all alone, certainly felt like an eternity.

My end had been quick. I hadn't suffered as she was suffering. I'd fallen asleep in the luxurious driving seat of a family car, to the soft sound of children singing.

She stood up and walked to the dresser, and pulled on the handle. She'd done this before. She pulled and cried and cried and pulled but never, never once, looked at the spot under the bedpost where the key was kept. I'd hidden it there months ago, for safety's sake, to keep the children from finding it.

She pulled the dresser so hard that it rocked forward onto two front legs and teetered for a moment on the verge of falling. It held there for what seemed like an age, a gulf of indecision between what was and what was not going to happen next. Then it fell back, ever so softly, into its resting place by the wall.

She crumpled then from the knees up, an uncomplicated downward motion that saw her come to rest sitting on her ankles on the floor. She cried a savage cry, a cry that wolves might cry, her shoulders shaking so violently with each wail that it looked like she might break.

She sat back, and came to rest with her back against the foot of the bed. She cried still, loudly and awfully, like torrential rain on a stormy day that shouldn't last but does until all hope of sunshine has left.

Eventually, emptied of tears, she sat and heaved great, ragged breaths that seemed to give her no life. She stared still at the drawer. I wondered what she saw there. I wondered if it to her was the escape that she had been spared but her family had not.

The bed moved as she leaned her weight against it. I moved from my vantage point by the window to the foot of the bed and watched, aghast, as her hand pressed down on the floor by the depression in the carpet at the foot of the bed, resting by, but not touching, the shiny object that lay there.

She stood, unmindful of its revelation, and walked to the dresser again. She watched herself this time in the mirror. She studied for some time the lines in her face, tracing them now and then with the soft tips of her fingers.

Then she paused. Her stance changed. Her whole body communicated recognition.

For a moment, a fleeting moment, I thought it was me she was looking at. My imaginary breath caught. My still heart jumped into my mouth.

She turned and looked right through what I had become. My heart fell, but my empty breath remained tight in my chest.

I followed her eyes, only too aware of where they would lead me.

She walked to the foot of the bed and crouched, scooping up what had been concealed. She held it up to the light, and looked at it for a while, watching the reflections in its surface.

My heart sank still further as she turned to the drawer.

She was not thinking, I could see. Her actions were meaningless to her now. Her eyes were empty; her mind was blank.

She crossed the small space in an instant and I watched, my eyes wide, willing her to turn around with every empty inch of what I had once been.

She did not seem to notice.

I tried to stand between her and the dresser and push her away and move her back and keep her clear and save her life.

But I was as insubstantial as air, as music, as mist.

The lock clicked as it opened, and I watched her reach for what was inside.

All at once it was too much. I screamed.

I bellowed forth a shriek of pain and rage and woe that bent me in two and tore me apart.

The room remained impassively silent.

The silence bore through me, mocking me, belittling my frantic efforts to make sound without air, voice without breath.

And then she raised her arm and the silence was shattered, never to be repaired.