PART 2
For several seconds, I could only stare at the folder lying on the floor.
Richard bent down, picked it up and placed it back on the table.
“Please,” I whispered. “Tell me what this is.”
He sat across from me.
Then he said something I wasn’t expecting.
“Thomas didn’t spend fifty-five years following you.”
I looked at him sharply.
“Then how did he know all of this?”
“Because I found it.”
Richard tapped the folder.
“Six months ago, when Thomas learned his cancer was terminal, he hired my firm to locate you.”
My stomach tightened.
“He wanted to know if you were alive. That was all.”
Richard explained that most of what frightened me—my addresses, my divorce, my work history—had been gathered from public records while his office searched for me.
Then they discovered something Thomas hadn’t expected.
I had already returned to our hometown.
“And when Thomas learned you were working at the hospital…” Richard paused.
I understood before he finished.
“He chose that hospital.”
Richard nodded.
Thomas had been receiving treatment in another city.
He had specifically requested to be transferred back home.
Not because he expected me to marry him.
Not even because he knew I would agree to see him.
He simply wanted one chance to look at me again before he died.
Suddenly, that hospital room felt completely different in my memory.
Our reunion hadn’t been an accident.
But neither had it been the sinister scheme I had imagined.
“What did he mean by the trap?” I asked.
Richard almost smiled.
“You haven’t read the last instruction.”
My hands were still trembling when I opened the folder again.
At the bottom of the page, beneath Thomas’s sentence—When she finally comes back, everything begins—was another line.
If she marries me, do not let her leave with only my last name. She has spent her whole life choosing everyone else. This time, make sure she cannot refuse herself.
I stared at it.
“I don’t understand.”
Richard opened the wooden box farther and removed a thick stack of documents.
The first was a property deed.
The address made my heart stop.
I knew that road.
Thomas and I used to walk along it when we were seventeen.
There had once been an empty hill there, overlooking a small lake.
I remembered sitting with him in the grass one summer evening while we described the imaginary house we would build someday.
A white porch.
A kitchen with big windows.
A garden.
Two rocking chairs facing the lake.
Thomas had even drawn it in one of my school notebooks.
I looked at Richard.
“What is this?”
“Thomas bought that land forty-three years ago.”
I almost laughed.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Richard slid a photograph toward me.
And my hand flew to my mouth.
There was a house standing on the hill.
White porch.
