Chapter 2: The Summer He Walked Away
I sat down beside the man I’d loved for forty-one years, and he told me the truth he’d been carrying since 1986, and it broke my heart and mended it in the same breath.
“The summer after our promise,” Jeffrey said, “before I left for school, I got sick. Really sick. The doctors ran tests, and they found something — a condition, a serious one, the kind they told me, at nineteen, would probably take me young. They gave me a handful of years. Maybe into my thirties, if I was lucky. That was the prognosis I got two weeks after I bought your ring.
I had the ring in my pocket, Ruthie. I was going to give it to you before I left. I’d planned the whole thing. And then I sat in a doctor’s office and got told I was dying, and everything changed.
Because I loved you too much to do it. I loved you too much to put a ring on your finger and make you a widow at twenty-five. I loved you too much to let you spend your best years watching me get sick and die, giving up everything you could have been to nurse a boy who wouldn’t see forty. I couldn’t do that to you. I couldn’t let you sign up for a marriage that was really just a countdown to a funeral.
