One afternoon, I entered a patient’s room and glanced at the chart.
Thomas Bennett.
My hands stopped.
I told myself it couldn’t possibly be him.
Then I looked at the man lying in the bed.
He was painfully thin. His hair had turned completely white, and illness had hollowed his face.
But his eyes were exactly the same.
Thomas looked at me for several seconds.
Then he smiled.
“Hello, sweetheart.”
My knees nearly gave way.
Thomas had stage-four cancer.
The doctors had already told him there was very little they could do.
Yet somehow, over those next few weeks, we became seventeen again.
I would finish my shift and sit beside his bed. We talked about everything we had missed.
He told me he had never married.
I laughed at first.
“You expect me to believe nobody ever wanted you?”
Thomas smiled.
“Plenty tried.”
Then his expression changed.
“But there was only one woman I wanted.”
I looked away because I already knew what he meant.
One evening, Thomas reached for my hand.
His fingers were weak.
“Sweetheart, I don’t have enough time left to be afraid of saying this.”
My eyes filled with tears.
“I loved you when I was seventeen. I loved you when I was thirty. I loved you when I was fifty. And apparently I was foolish enough to love you all the way to seventy-three.”
I started crying.
