Sally might have screamed and gone right on screaming—if she had been a different kind of woman. On seeing her husband lying dead her impulse might have been to throw herself down beside him, give way to her grief in a wild fit of sobbing.
But where there was no grief there could be no sobbing ...
One thing only she did before she left. She unloosed the collar of the unmoving form on the floor and looked for the small brown mole she did not really expect to find. The mole she knew to be on her husband's shoulder, high up on the left side.
She had noticed things that made her doubt her sanity; she needed to see the little black mole to reassure her ...
She had noticed the difference in the hair-line, the strange slant of the eyebrows, the crinkly texture of the skin where it should have been smooth ...
Something was wrong ... horribly, weirdly wrong ...
Even the hands of the sprawled form seemed larger and hairier than the hands of her husband. Nevertheless it was important to be sure ...
The absence of the mole clinched it.
Sally crouched beside the body, carefully readjusting the collar. Then she got up and walked out of the office.
Some homecomings are joyful, others cruel. Sitting in the taxi, clenching and unclenching her hands, Sally had no plan that could be called a plan, no hope that was more than a dim flickering in a vast wasteland, bleak and unexplored.