Fragile

He listened as the hiss and snap devoured her words. He had promised to burn the diaries without reading them after she passed. She would have burned them herself, but she could not carry out the removal of her own recorded history while battling the slow erasure of her physical body.

Thinking that surely the last had been burnt beyond recognition, he turned to view the ashes. Through no real fault of his own, he read the last bit of a page that had shifted enough to burn last. "Because he is fragile, I have never told him I s-"