He wrote that he wished he’d been thirty years younger and then wrote, underneath, that he was glad he hadn’t been, because a younger man would never have known enough to be grateful for what I gave him.

His daughter did not laugh again. She wrote to me a year later, not warmly, but not cruelly either, to say she had misjudged the timing of my grief. It was the most she could manage and I accepted it as what it was.

I run the bookshop. It does not make much. I do not need it to.

I kept one of his watches, the cheap one, the one he actually wore, which the children did not want.

Everyone was certain they knew what I deserved, and so was I. I married a man to survive and I stayed because I stopped needing to. Barrett was the only person who ever looked at me and saw past the reason I arrived to the person I became. He gave me exactly what I deserved, and it was not the house or the money. It was the one thing no one had offered me in years, which was to be seen clearly, and chosen anyway.