Chapter 5: The Promise He Kept
Jeffrey died four days later.
I was there. So was Peter, who has become, in the strange grace of these things, something like family to me — the son of the man I loved, who understood, watching us those final days, that his father had loved two women fully and honestly and had never once been unfaithful to either, because loving me from inside a box for forty-one years was its own kind of faithfulness, and staying with his mother was another.
I have the letters now. All forty-one. I read them slowly, one a week, and it’s like getting a lifetime of a marriage I never had, delivered in reverse, from a man who narrated our whole imaginary life to me in secret because he couldn’t bear to stop loving me and couldn’t bear to burden me with it. On my birthday each year now, I read the one he wrote that year. It is the strangest, saddest, most beautiful gift anyone has ever given me. He is still, somehow, wishing me happy birthday, forty-one times over, from a box beside a hospital bed.
