Chapter 4 - The Woman Who Loved Him Too
I did not stay for dinner.
That surprised everyone, including me.
After an hour, Thomas grew tired. His answers slowed. The effort of reaching backward seemed to take something physical from him.
Rosa brought his medication and suggested a rest.
I stood.
“I’ll come back tomorrow, if you’d like.”
Thomas looked at me.
“Will you?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, but the question remained in his face.
I understood it.
People had probably entered and left his life carrying promises he couldn’t keep track of.
I had done my own waiting.
That didn’t mean his fear was smaller.
At the hotel, Grace ordered soup neither of us wanted.
Then she sat across from me on the bed.
“Well?”
I stared at the spoon.
“He’s old.”
She blinked.
“So are you.”
“I know. It’s outrageous.”
She laughed.
Then I cried.
I cried for the young man who had not come back.
For the old man who had.
For Caroline, whose photograph stood on the mantel in the next room.
For the version of myself who had spent years imagining that faithfulness meant remaining unchanged.
Grace held me until I could speak.
“I don’t know where I fit.”
“Then don’t force yourself into a space tonight.”
“What if he doesn’t really remember me?”
“Then you decide whether you want to know the person he is.”
It was a simple distinction.
I wished somebody had offered it to me decades earlier.
The next morning, Lucas met us downstairs with another folder.
“This belonged to my mother.”
Inside were notebooks, appointment calendars, and copies of letters.
Caroline had kept records.
Not as a detective.
As a woman trying to help her husband make sense of his own life.
Some pages listed possible names.
Others described dreams.
A river.
A damaged aircraft.
A girl reading beside an open window.
Eleanor.
There were letters to organizations, medical specialists, and people who might know something about his past. Some replies were sympathetic. Others asked for information he could not provide.
I turned a page and found a note in Caroline’s handwriting.
He is frightened that remembering someone else will make our life less real.
I told him truth does not subtract love.
I read it twice.
“Did she ever resent me?” I asked.
Lucas considered the question.
“I think she resented not knowing whether someone was suffering. She sometimes said there might be a person somewhere who had never been allowed to stop waiting.”
I pressed my lips together.
“She was right.”
“I know.”
He handed me a photograph.
Caroline stood in a vegetable garden wearing oversized gloves. Thomas was beside her, laughing at something outside the frame.
The jealousy came again.
Then something else followed it.
Gratitude.
Not a clean, comfortable gratitude.
A difficult one.
Someone had made him laugh.
While I was imagining him beneath cold earth, someone had put gloves in his hands and given him tomatoes to stake.
“I wish I could thank her,” I said.
Lucas looked down.
“She would have liked that.”
The notebooks also revealed when the search had changed.
Two years earlier, Lucas had found an old university recording while helping his father explore fragments of remembered songs and names.
A local archive had digitized a student literary broadcast.
My voice was on it.
Eleanor Reed, introducing a reading.
Thomas had reacted before seeing the accompanying photograph.
“He said your name,” Lucas told me. “Clearly. Not Ellie. Eleanor Reed.”
From there, they found a yearbook.
Then an alumni notice.
Then a dead end.
I had left my hometown, resumed my mother’s surname, and built a life elsewhere.
Early records had not made that transition easy to follow.
But there was another obstacle.
A letter had come back through an old family address.
Eleanor Reed died many years ago. Please stop causing distress.
I stared at the sentence.
The handwriting was familiar.
Not my mother’s.
Not my father’s.
My sister Margaret’s.
Grace saw my face change.
“Mom?”
I could hear Margaret’s voice across decades.
You can’t keep living for a dead man.
You’re embarrassing yourself.
Nobody is going to bring him back.
I set the letter carefully on the table.
My sister had died the previous winter.
There would be no confrontation.
No explanation.
Only the knowledge that when Thomas finally reached toward me, someone I loved had closed the door.
I looked at Lucas.
“When did you receive this?”
“Eighteen months ago.”
“And you believed it?”
“For a while.”
My voice shook.
“What changed?”
“My father said he wanted to see your grave.”
Lucas swallowed.
“So I started looking for it.”
May you like
He met my eyes.
“There wasn’t one.”
