When we were 19, my best friend and I promised that if we were both single at 60, we’d find each other — I turned 60 last Tuesday, and my old landline rang.

He wrote it down in 1986. He wrote it all down when he was twenty-one and it was fresh and he could still have fixed it, and he put a stamp on it, and he put it in a shoebox.

Sam says he has read it once and will not read it again.

And in the February, on the anniversary of his son’s birth, I took that card to the postbox at the end of Mill Lane, and I posted it to the address on the front.

Which is my mother’s house. Which is where I live.

It came back to me on the Tuesday, forty years late, with a 1986 stamp and a 2026 postmark on top of it, and I signed for it myself at my own front door.

I do not entirely know why I did that. Sam thinks it is the maddest thing he has ever heard and he laughed for about a minute, which was the first time either of us had laughed since the Saturday.