She led her blind husband into the Oregon forest and left him there, knowing he could not find his way home.

Gloria Salgado did not say goodbye.

She did not apologize.

She simply told Michael to sit on a fallen log while she went to fetch water from the creek, then walked away through the dead leaves until even her footsteps disappeared.

At first, Michael waited because he trusted old habits.

For twenty-two years, when Gloria said she would come back, she came back.

She returned from the market.

She returned from church.

She returned from the garden with dirt under her nails and a tired sound in her throat.

But this time, the forest stayed empty.

“Gloria?” he called.

The word struck the trees and fell apart.

He turned his head toward the place where he thought she had gone.

His eyes, cloudy and useless, stared into a darkness that never changed.

It was afternoon, he knew that much.

The air still held the damp chill of October, and somewhere high above him, branches scraped together like old bones.

“Gloria!”

No answer.

His hand tightened around the handle of his cane.

Then something inside him, something colder than fear, understood the truth before his mind allowed it.

She had not lost the path.

She had not slipped.

She had not gone too far to hear him.

She had left him.

Michael Salgado had once known those woods better than any man in town.

He had hauled cedar, split fir, and followed deer trails under moonlight with a confidence people admired.

In his younger years, he could name trees by the feel of their bark and tell rain was coming by the heaviness in the moss.

Back then, men waved when he passed.

Women smiled at Gloria because she was married to a useful man.

Children ran behind his truck when he came back with logs stacked high, begging him to honk the horn.

Michael had never been rich.

But he had been needed.

That had mattered more than money.

Then the sickness came like fog rolling over the hills.

At first, he blamed tired eyes.

He missed the edge of the chopping block once, then twice.

He mistook one neighbor for another outside the hardware store.

Gloria laughed the first time he poured coffee beside the cup instead of into it.

“You’re working too hard,” she told him.

He wanted to believe her.

But the haze thickened.

Faces became pale circles.

The road became a gray strip.

The flame in the stove turned into a smeared glow, then nothing at all.

In Portland, the specialist used gentle hands and merciless words.

“I’m sorry, Mr.

Salgado,” the doctor said.

“The damage is permanent.”

Michael heard Gloria inhale sharply beside him.

He waited for her to squeeze his arm.

She did.

At first.

For months after that, Gloria tried to be the wife people expected.

She read labels aloud.

She guided him from room to room.

She cut the burnt edges off his toast and described the sunrise in careful detail, as if giving him the world back one sentence at a time.

“The clouds are pink over the ridge,” she would say.

Michael would close his eyes, though it made no difference, and pretend he could see it through her