Forty-one letters, Ruthie. Forty-one birthdays. I never stopped. I loved you every single year, in writing, in secret, in a box you were never supposed to see until now.”
I picked up the letters with shaking hands. Forty-one years of a love I thought had abandoned me, sitting in my palms, every envelope proof that the boy under the bleachers had never once let me go — he’d just carried me quietly, for a lifetime, believing it was the price of my happiness.
Chapter 4: The Truth We Got at the End
Carol had passed two years earlier, Jeffrey told me. He’d nursed her through her own illness, faithfully, to the end, because she’d given him her life and he owed her his loyalty, and he gave it fully. He was not a man who did things halfway. He’d loved me by leaving me and honored Carol by staying, and both of those were true at once, and both cost him everything.
