I unzipped the backpack with hands that wouldn’t stay still.
No money fell out. No legal documents, no letter demanding I keep some promise. Just envelopes — dozens of them, each one labeled in Thomas’s small, deliberate handwriting. Bus Stop. Grocery Store. Airport. Laundromat. Park Bench. Waiting Room. Hospital Chapel. At the very bottom, wedged beneath all of it, sat a notebook with corners gone soft from handling.
I picked up Bus Stop first, because it was the only word small enough for me to hold onto that night.
Inside was an old train ticket, its edges worn thin as tissue. Written on the back, in the same tired hand: She finally went. That was all. No name. No date. I turned it over twice, as if the front might explain the back. It never did.
I should tell you how a woman ends up married to a man she’d known for three weeks — a man twice her age, dying of something the doctors had stopped naming out loud.
