The creek sounds exactly as it did when I was nineteen.
Nothing else does.
The town changed.
The school expanded.
The diner became a pharmacy.
The Whitmore house disappeared.
My parents are gone.
Walter is gone.
Harold is gone.
Most of the people who thought they knew what was best for us are gone.
But I am still here.
And that matters.
For years after Walter disappeared, I carried one sentence inside me:
I’ve made my choice.
It taught me something terrible about myself.
That I had not been enough.
That the boy who planned a porch with me had simply looked at the future and chosen one without me.
Then, fifty-four years later, I opened a rusted garage and discovered the sentence had never belonged to Walter at all.
Someone else wrote it.
Someone else made the choice.
That was what Walter had spent his life regretting.
Not that we failed to marry at nineteen.
