Then I looked at the man sitting beside me.
“Yes.”
He smiled.
“And what about sixty-year-old Ruth?”
I squeezed his hand.
“She’s smarter.”
Jeffrey laughed.
“So that’s a no?”
“No.”
I leaned closer.
“It means she understands that we don’t need another forty years to prove something we already know.”
Jeffrey took out the ring.
Then, forty-one years after he bought it, he slipped it onto my finger.
It fit.
I looked at him.
He rested his head gently against mine.
For most of my life, I believed our story had ended in 1986.
It hadn’t.
We had simply stopped writing it.
Now Jeffrey calls me every morning.
Peter visits often.
His daughter Anna has already started calling me Aunt Ruth, even though I told her she doesn’t have to.
Jeffrey and I will never recover the decades we lost.
I’ve accepted that.
But I refuse to waste whatever time remains by mourning years neither of us can change.
For most of my life, I believed that meeting the right person at the wrong time meant the opportunity was gone forever.
Now I know timing isn’t always the end of the story.
Sometimes life opens the same door twice.
You just have to be brave enough to walk through it the second time.
