Her hair was silver now, and soft lines framed her mouth, but her eyes were exactly as I remembered them.
And somehow, they looked familiar in another way too.
I couldn’t understand why.
“Walter.”
“Anna. I’m sorry to appear like this out of nowhere. My wife, Carol… she passed away a few weeks ago. Before she died, she asked me to find you.”
Something shifted across Anna’s face.
Recognition.
Sorrow.
And a tired kind of understanding.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “I think I know why.”
She stepped aside.
“Come in, Walter. You’d better sit down.”
Anna poured two cups of coffee, her hands trembling slightly.
“What did Carol want me to know?”
She sat across from me.
“That I never turned you down because you moved.”
My chest went cold.
“Then why?”
“Your mother came to my apartment. Spring of 1985. She wore that gray coat with the fur collar. Do you remember it?”
“I remember.”
“She sat on my sofa and told me I was unsuitable. Wrong background. Wrong family. Wrong future for her son.”
I carefully placed my mug on the table because my hand had started shaking.
“My mom said that?”
“She said more than that.”
“What did she threaten you with?”
“She threatened to get Dad fired when my parents were already barely surviving. My sister was about to marry a good man, and Ruth threatened to destroy her reputation.”
“She couldn’t have done that.”
Anna held my gaze.
“Couldn’t she?”
I had no answer.
Everyone in Millfield listened to Ruth.
“My mother,” I whispered. “My mother taught Sunday school.”
“Your mother had power,” Anna said softly. “And she used it on a twenty-year-old girl whose family had nothing.”
“So the letter you sent me—the one saying you couldn’t handle the distance…”
“I wrote it that night. I cried the whole way through it.”
I stared down at the coffee between my hands.
“What happened afterward? Did you marry?”
Anna shook her head.
“No.”
“Children?”
“No. There was never anyone else I could imagine that life with.”
Forty years suddenly felt much longer.
For all that time, I’d believed Anna simply hadn’t loved me enough.
“Why didn’t you come to me? Even after you left?”
