Large kitchen windows.
A garden.
And two rocking chairs.
Exactly as we had imagined it at seventeen.
“He built it?” I whispered.
“Twenty-eight years ago.”
“Who lived there?”
Richard looked at me.
“No one.”
That answer hurt more than I expected.
Thomas had maintained the house all those years.
He had replaced the roof, repaired the porch, planted trees and paid the taxes.
But he had never moved into it.
When Richard once asked him why he owned an empty house, Thomas apparently answered:
“Because I promised someone I’d build it.”
I began crying.
But Richard still hadn’t finished.
“There’s more.”
He handed me another document.
Thomas had left me the house.
Then came the bank statements.
I looked at the number once.
Then again.
“Richard… this can’t be right.”
Thomas’s father’s small business had grown enormously over the decades. Thomas had sold most of it years earlier and invested the money.
He had been wealthy.
Very wealthy.
I pushed the documents away.
“No.”
Richard had apparently expected that.
“There it is,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“The trap.”
I stared at him.
“Thomas knew you’d say no.”
“He knew I wouldn’t take his money?”
“He said you were the most stubborn seventeen-year-old he had ever met, and apparently seventy-three hadn’t improved you much.”
Despite everything, a laugh escaped me through my tears.
Then Richard handed me Thomas’s final letter.
This one had been written only eleven days before he died.
My name was on the front.
I opened it.
My sweetheart,
If Richard is reading this with you, you have probably already tried to give everything back.
I actually looked at Richard.
He raised an eyebrow.
Thomas really had known me.
I continued.
Please don’t.
This is not payment for marrying me. And it is not an apology for the fifty-five years we lost. No amount of money can buy back time.
The house is yours because I built it for you long before I knew whether I would ever see you again.
Then I reached the next paragraph.
And had to stop.
You once told me, when we were seventeen, that you wanted to become a nurse because you never wanted frightened people to feel alone in a hospital room.
I remembered saying it.
I had completely forgotten.
Thomas hadn’t.
You did exactly that with your life. You sat beside strangers when they were frightened. You held hands nobody else wanted to hold. And when I became one of those frightened people, somehow you came back and held mine too.
