“He gave you these because he’d done to us exactly what his father-in-law tried to do to him.”
“That’s what he said. Almost word for word.”
I put my hand flat on top of those letters.
“Then why didn’t you just come back?”
“Because I’d Already Promised My Life to Margaret”
“Because by then I’d already asked her. And she’d already said yes. And her parents had already booked the church.”
He looked at me.
“And because I loved her too, Ruth. That’s the part I need you to hear and I need you to believe.”
That Didn’t Hurt the Way I Expected
I want to try to explain this, because I’ve thought about it every day since.
I was sixty years old, sitting in a hospital room, and a man I’d loved since I was seventeen was telling me he’d loved somebody else.
And it didn’t cut the way I would have predicted at twenty-one, or thirty-five, or even fifty.
