I looked at the kitchen clock.
10:17.
Forty-three minutes.
My first thought came from the twenty-three-year-old woman still hidden somewhere inside me.
James is alive.
My second thought was unbearable.
If James had been alive all these years, then every Christmas I had spent alone, every anniversary, every birthday, every ordinary evening in my little house had happened while my husband existed somewhere else.
Without me.
I looked at the card again.
Adrian lied.
Adrian had remained loosely connected to my life for decades.
He attended both my parents’ funerals.
He mailed Christmas cards every year until his hands grew too shaky to write.
And he was the man who had sat across from me at twenty-three years old and told me James was almost certainly dead.
I reached for the telephone.
Then stopped.
Act normally.
Why would James demand secrecy?
Why not simply call?
Why not knock on my front door?
And if James hadn’t written these instructions, who else could possibly know about the yellow dress?
I hurried upstairs.
At the back of my closet sat an old cedar chest.
Inside, beneath layers of tissue paper, was the dress.
The yellow had faded over the decades, but it was still unmistakable.
I lifted it carefully.
Then my fingers found three clumsy stitches near the side seam.
Suddenly I smiled.
James had sewn those.
The night after our wedding, I had torn the dress on a nail sticking out from my parents’ porch.
James proudly announced that he could repair it.
He couldn’t.
His stitches wandered crookedly across the fabric, tightening one side into an ugly little wrinkle.
I laughed so hard that evening he threatened to divorce me before we reached forty-eight hours of marriage.
Now I looked at those crooked stitches.
Then I thought about the badly folded paper rose downstairs.
James had always been excellent with things requiring strength.
Engines.
Tools.
Fences.
But anything involving patience or delicate hands?
Hopeless.
Whoever folded that flower had hands exactly like his.
At 10:42, I left the house.
The yellow dress rested over one arm.
The enormous bouquet filled the other.
The old train station was only a short distance away.
Passenger trains hadn’t stopped there for decades.
The town had eventually restored the building into a historical site, but I had avoided it my entire adult life.
I had not stepped inside since the morning James left.
