Two weeks of test after test.
Two weeks of doctors using careful words and avoiding direct ones.
Two weeks of me visiting every single day, sitting beside him, holding his hand, talking about neighbors, grocery prices, the leaking faucet, and anything to make the room feel less like a place that was stealing him from me.
But he wasn’t himself. Sometimes he would just look at me with this strange, aching expression, like he was carrying something too heavy to say out loud.
But he wasn’t himself.
***
Three days ago, they told me he needed emergency surgery.
An hour ago, they told me he was gone.
Now, there was a zipper under my thumb.
“I hate you a little right now,” I whispered to the pillow.
Then I pulled it open. My fingers found envelopes first. A stack of them, tied with a blue ribbon from our kitchen junk drawer. Under them was something hard and small.
“I hate you a little right now.”
It was a beautiful velvet ring box.
I stopped breathing for a second.
There were 24 envelopes, one for every year of our marriage.
Anthony’s handwriting was on every single one.
Year One. Year Two. Year Three, all the way to Year Twenty-Four.
My mouth went dry.
There were 24 envelopes.
I opened the first one so fast I tore the corner.
“Year One of Us:
Ember,
Thank you for marrying a man with more hope than furniture.”
I laughed, and then I made a sound that wasn’t laughter at all.
“Oh, Anthony,” I mumbled to the empty car.
I opened the first one.
“Thank you for pretending our apartment wasn’t terrible when the radiator hissed all night, and the upstairs neighbor practiced trumpet like he had declared war on sleep.
Thank you for eating spaghetti on milk crates with me and calling it romantic if we squinted.
Thank you for choosing me when I was still mostly all plans and not enough action.”
I could hear his voice in every line, just my husband, acting like devotion was the most natural thing in the world.
I opened another.
I could hear his voice in every line.
“Year Eleven of Us:
Ember,
Thank you for holding my face in both your hands the day I lost my job and for saying, ‘We aren’t ruined, Tony. We’re just scared. We’re going to make it work.’
I have lived inside those words ever since.”
I closed my eyes.
“Year Eleven of Us”
