“Eleanor,” she said quietly, “come sit down for a moment.”
I pulled my arm away. “No. Where is he? Something must’ve happened to him.”
Thomas never came.
I do not remember leaving the church. I remember being in a room somewhere behind it, still in my dress, while people spoke in soft voices as if I were ill or sleeping.
The next morning, I opened my front door and found a folded note on the step.
I recognized his handwriting before I picked it up.
“I’m sorry. I can’t do this. Don’t look for me.”
My mother found me still standing there in my nightgown.
She read it, and her face hardened. “Coward.”
“Something happened,” I said.
I believed that with my whole heart. Thomas was many things, but he was not cruel.
So I went to his house to get answers.
But when I arrived there, the curtains were gone.
A neighbor told me that the entire family had left before dawn.
I couldn’t believe it. More than ever, I thought something terrible must’ve happened. But no matter how hard I searched for answers, I came up empty every time.
“Ellie,” my sister Ruth said one evening, “you have to stop doing this to yourself.”
“But there must be a reason…” I said.
She softened and took my hand. “You have to let it go.”
But I never could.
Life kept moving. I worked. I cared for my parents as they aged.
One kind man named Daniel courted me so gently it almost broke my heart.
“You deserve someone who can come all the way toward you,” I told him. “And I can’t.”
He nodded once. I watched him walk away and knew I had closed the door on the only real chance I ever had after Thomas.
Fifty-three years passed like that. Enough years for my hair to turn white, for my parents to die, for Ruth to become a grandmother.
Enough years that Thomas’s face should have blurred in my mind.
It never did.
Then, four days ago, I got a call from an unknown number that turned my life upside down.
“Hello?”
A pause. Then a woman’s voice, older and thinner than I remembered.
“Eleanor?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Carol.”
I had to sit down. Carol. Thomas’s sister.
