Frosted Twilight, Gentle Dawn

At eighty-eight, my husband lay paralyzed in a wheelchair, his consciousness flickering in and out.

Yet whenever he was lucid, he would grip my hand and mutter, “Throw away those useless paintings, they’re just taking up space.”

I had stood by him for thirty years, burying my award certificates at the bottom of a trunk, packing away my brushes and canvases in the attic, content to be the “obedient, proper” wife in his eyes.

Until one day Nurse Helen handed me an old letter he had hidden. It was a note he had written to a student: “What does she know about art?