I stared at those words until they blurred in front of me. Adrian lied to you. I read the sentence again and again, hoping I had misunderstood it. Adrian had been the man who came to my parents’ house after James disappeared. He had held my hands while he told me about the explosion. He had cried with me. He had told me James was gone. For fifty-six years, I had believed that man had been carrying a terrible truth. Now James was telling me he had been lying. I looked at the roses sitting on my kitchen table. There were exactly fifty-six yellow roses, one for every year since the day James left. My hands were still trembling when I turned the card over. There was an address written on the back, followed by four words: “Come alone. Tomorrow morning.”
I barely slept that night. Every memory of my marriage suddenly seemed different. The last morning with James. The promise of the roses. Adrian standing on my parents’ porch. The telegram confirming James was presumed dead. Even the photographs I had kept for decades seemed to contain secrets I had never noticed. At sunrise, I took the card from my bedside table and studied the handwriting. I knew it immediately. There was no doubt in my mind. It was James’s handwriting. I had seen those letters thousands of times before he left. The loops, the slanted words, the way he crossed his t’s—it was unmistakably his. But if James had survived, where had he been all these years? Why had he allowed me to believe he was dead? Why hadn’t he come home? And most importantly, why was he suddenly asking me to come alone after fifty-six years?