I finally opened the letter.
At the bottom, my father had written:
“If you ever tell Mary about this conversation, tell her I did not choose you for her. I simply saw what the two of you were still too afraid to see.”
I started crying.
George tookurm my hand.
“Are you angry with me?”
I looked at him.
Then I laughed through my tears.
“A little. Fifty-four years is a very long time to keep something like this from your wife.”
He laughed too.
“I know.”
A few minutes later, our children came back into the room.
Child development books
Our daughter saw my red eyes and immediately looked worried.
“Mom, is everything okay?”
I looked at George.
Then I squeezed his hand.
“Everything is fine.”
That evening, when George finally blew out the candles on his 80th birthday cake, our children took another photo of us sitting side by side.
Birthday party planning
They still believed we had always had the perfect marriage.
I no longer thought of it that way.
It had never been perfect.
It was something more meaningful than that.
Because fifty-four years earlier, a young man could have stepped onto a train and disappeared from my life.
But he turned around.
And every day after that, he chose me again.
