My first instinct was to find you.
Then I did.
My heart jumped.
Walter had hired no investigator.
There was no secret surveillance.
He looked through public records and eventually found my name in a local newspaper article about a charity fundraiser.
There I was.
Margaret Bennett.
Beside Harold.
Walter wrote:
You are married. There is a photograph of you and your husband standing beside two children. You are smiling.
I have a wife asleep upstairs. Our youngest has a spelling test tomorrow.
For three hours I have been sitting here asking whether the truth gives me the right to enter your life.
Then:
It doesn’t.
I started sobbing.
Walter had wanted to call.
He did not.
Not because he stopped loving me.
Because by then there were four other people whose lives were real.
Harold.
Joan.
My children.
His.
The teenage dream had become history.
Walter refused to turn history into permission to damage the present.
