he said.
“You’d better.”
“White?”
“White.”
“Everything you own is white.”
“That’s because I have taste.”
“You’re marrying me.”
“Eventually.”
He kissed me.
“Then your argument is already ruined.”
Two years later, Walter disappeared.
The letter beneath my door said only:
I’ve made my choice. Please don’t look for me.
I hated him for most of my twenties.
Then I learned not to.
Eventually, hatred became something duller.
A scar you stop touching.
I married Harold Bennett at twenty-six.
Harold never demanded that I pretend Walter had not existed. Once, early in our marriage, he found an old photograph of Walter and me at a county fair.
He handed it back.
“First love?”
“Yes.”
“Serious?”
“I thought so.”
Harold nodded.
“Keep the picture.”
That was Harold.
No competition with ghosts.
No jealousy over history.
He gave me forty-six years, two children, seven grandchildren and more ordinary happiness than seventeen-year-old Margaret could ever have imagined.
