I imagined holding her hand and telling her that, after all those years, I was finally where I belonged.
Instead, I found myself sitting on the edge of our bed, staring at the scars covering the shoulders of the woman I had once promised to protect.
And when she finally told me how she had received them, I cried harder than I had cried at my own wife’s funeral.
Not because Anna was damaged.
Not because she had hidden the truth from me.
But because I suddenly understood that while I had spent forty years remembering the beautiful young woman I lost, she had spent much of those same years surviving a life she had never chosen.
My name is Richard Hayes, and this is the story of how I found my first love again at sixty-one—and discovered that sometimes, the greatest act of love is not making someone feel young again.
