I’d tell him about my first teaching job, the students who drove me crazy, the friends I had lost, and the little victories that made growing older worthwhile.
Sometimes I spoke to him for an hour.
Sometimes I couldn’t say a word.
I never knew whether he was dead or alive. That uncertainty became a room inside my heart that I never learned how to close.
Eventually, I turned seventy-six.
My hair had turned silver, my hands had developed the fine lines of age, and my knees complained whenever I climbed too many stairs. I had long ago accepted that I would probably never learn what had happened to Thomas.
Then, on an ordinary afternoon at the airport, a stranger changed everything.
I was returning from a short visit to my sister when a young man approached me near the baggage carousel.
“Excuse me, ma’am. Are you Elizabeth Morgan?”
I looked at him cautiously.
