If someone couldn’t manage without me, I felt loved.
That belief quietly shaped my entire life.
I married Robert when I was twenty-eight.
We weren’t rich.
We weren’t glamorous.
We weren’t the couple who took expensive vacations or drove new cars every year.
But we had something I thought was better.
We had plans.
Small plans.
Realistic plans.
Robert wanted to travel.
He wanted to see Italy.
He wanted to stand in front of the pyramids.
He wanted to drive across Australia.
He wanted to take me to Paris and order breakfast in a tiny café where neither of us understood the menu.
I wanted those things too.
We talked about them constantly.
We had a little envelope in our kitchen drawer labeled:
TRAVEL.
Whenever we had spare money, we put some inside.
Twenty dollars.
Fifty.
Sometimes only five.
We laughed about how slowly it was growing.
“Someday,” Robert would say.
