“You need to face reality, Mom, this place is a money pit and you are living in a fire hazard,” my son Richard said, his voice entirely flat as he dropped a heavy cardboard box onto my kitchen floor.

He didn’t look at me. He was too busy scanning the living room, probably calculating the square footage and how much he could get per square foot.

Richard is a real estate agent in Grand Rapids, and he has a way of looking at homes like they are already dead. To him, my thirty years of flower beds and the creak in the hallway were just liabilities. He wanted me out. He wanted the house sold before the spring market hit.

Right there on the small lamp table by the armchair was Arthur’s old paperback. It was a copy of The Blue Lake, a cheap mystery novel with a picture of a fading sailboat on the cover. Arthur had been halfway through it in October when his heart simply stopped. It had sat there all through the long, freezing Michigan winter, holding his place.

“I already called the junk removal guys for the books,” Richard continued, adjusting his smart watch. “They can be here Tuesday. We need to clear these shelves before the photographer comes.”

I felt my jaw lock. I could hear my own pulse in my ears. I didn’t say a word. I just stood there by the sink, gripping a damp dish towel until my fingers went numb. That is what I do when I am too angry to speak. I go completely still.

Richard interpreted my silence as surrender. He smiled, that professional, polished smile he uses on clients, and patted my shoulder. “It is for the best, Mom. You will thank me later.”

But he didn’t know about Arthur’s habit. Nobody did, really, except me.

Arthur and I were married for forty-four years. For forty-four years, he read the last page of every single book first. It didn’t matter if it was a thick history book or a cheap thriller he bought for ten cents at the library basement sale. He would open the back cover, read the final paragraph, and only then would he start chapter one.

It drove me absolutely wild.

I remember we were in the public library in East Grand Rapids back in 1982. The afternoon sun was coming through those high windows, smelling of old paper and wet wool coats. Arthur was standing in the fiction aisle, holding a paperback, his thumb already slipping to the very end.

“Arthur, please,” I whispered, pulling at his sleeve. “You are ruining the mystery. What is the point of reading it if you already know who did it?”

He looked down at me, his eyes crinkling at the corners. He was wearing his old green cardigan, the one with the chipped leather button. He always had a yellow pencil tucked behind his ear.