I turned the bag over. A receipt was stapled to the front.
The store’s name was our hospital’s gift shop.
The date was three days after my surgery.
Rowan had been there. He had walked into that building and bought gifts, and he had never made it to my room.
I stood in the garage holding a stuffed bear with the tag still on it and thought about Rowan driving to that hospital. Walking through the lobby. Standing somewhere in that building, close enough to buy a stuffed animal and a card with a ribbon on it, and a box of chocolates with a bow, and then not being able to walk through my door.
For two weeks I had been certain he didn’t care enough to come.
The truth, I was beginning to understand, was almost the opposite of that.
The anger I’d been carrying for two weeks began to loosen in a way I wasn’t entirely prepared for. I set the bear down carefully on the workbench, smoothed its bow, and stood there for a moment.
On the back door was one final note.
“Come outside. I’m sorry it took me this long to be ready.”
The garden had been cleared and replanted. The broken gate had been rehung. The stone path we’d planned since the second summer ran from the back door to a small glass-and-cedar structure I had never seen before.
The sunroom.
The one he’d been promising since the year we got married. Every time I described what I wanted, he’d listen and say it was going to be beautiful and that we’d build it one day. On the doorframe, at eye level, was one more card.
“You described exactly this when we were thirty-one. I remembered everything.”
I stood there for a moment before I pushed the door open.
He was inside it. Asleep in a folding chair, his head tipped back, his arms still in a shirt covered in dried paint. Around him on the floor were blueprints and receipts, and the general wreckage of someone who had been working without stopping.
I touched his shoulder.
He startled awake and saw me, and the relief on his face lasted about one second before he registered mine.
“Bev?”
“Two weeks,” I said. “Rowan. Two weeks.”
He stood slowly. I stepped back because I wasn’t ready to be reached for.
