My husband Harold was gone sixteen days when the hospice nurse called to ask if I knew a woman named Lorraine. I said no. Nurse Carol got quiet, then said, “He asked for her at the end.” Not once. Three times. Twenty minutes before his breathing changed, Harold opened his eyes and said, “Tell Lorraine I kept the blue house.” I wrote the words on the back of a sympathy card because I did not trust myself to remember them. We never had a blue house. Not in forty-two years of marriage.

I told myself dying people say nonsense. Harold had spent his last week drifting, calling me by my sister’s name. But then Carol added one more thing. “He seemed relieved after he said it.” Relieved. That word sat on my chest all afternoon. After supper, I went to his workshop. It still smelled like sawdust, motor oil, and the peppermint candies he kept in a Folgers can. I opened drawers I had cleaned around for thirty years, and in the bottom cabinet, behind a box of Mason jar lids, I found a shoebox wrapped in duct tape.

Inside were twenty-seven money order stubs, sent every March and October to a post office box in Duluth, Minnesota. Payable to Lorraine Fisher. Beneath them lay a photograph: Harold at twenty-five, beside a blue house, next to a woman holding a baby. On the back, four words in his handwriting: “Before Edith. Don’t destroy.” Then headlights swept across the workshop window.