My husband left his medication at home, so I stopped by his office to bring it to him. But when I asked the receptionist to call him downstairs, she said, "Ma'am, your husband has been on leave for the past week."

It was not dignity. I could not make my legs do it. I sat there with my hand on the door handle and nothing happened.

I watched the two of them for about four minutes from inside a car with the engine off.

And they did not look like anything I had been imagining for twenty-four hours.

There was no distance between them and there was no closeness either. They looked like two people who had done this before.

She was not laughing. There was nothing in the way they were standing.

At one point my husband put his hands on his knees and bent forward slightly — the way a man does coming off a football pitch, or the way a man does when something has gone out of his legs.

He stayed like that for about eleven seconds.

And my sister put a hand flat on my husband's back and left it there for about eleven seconds.