Robbie saw it pull up ahead of him only ten feet too late; but those ten feet were enough to send a scaffolding-pole smashing through the windshield of his Porsche and straight into his chest. The medical examiner told me that he never would have known what hit him. “I’m truly sorry, Mr Deacon; but he never would have known what hit him.” Instant death; painless. Painless, that is, to Robbie. But not to Jill; and not to me; and not to anybody who had known him. Jill was his wife of thirteen weeks; and I was his brother of 31 years; and his humor and vivacity had won him more friends than you could count. For a whole month afterward I kept his photograph on my desk. Broad-faced, five years younger than me, much more like Dad than I was; laughing at some long-forgotten joke. Then one morning in early October I came into the office and put the photograph away in my middle desk-drawer. It was then that I knew it was over; that he was really gone for ever. That same afternoon, as if she had been affected by the same feeling of finality, Jill called me.
