I loved him.
Completely.
That mattered.
Because when Walter called me after Harold died, I was not a woman who had spent fifty years waiting.
I had lived.
So had Walter.
He married too.
His wife, Joan, died six years before Harold.
They had three children.
Careers.
Mortgages.
Christmases.
Arguments.
Grandchildren.
Separate lives.
Then, at seventy-five, Walter lay dying and somehow decided the most reasonable thing to do was call the girl he had abandoned fifty-four years earlier and ask her to marry him.
I called him shameless.
Then I visited him anyway.
Three weeks later, I became Margaret Bennett Whitmore in a hospital room with eleven people glaring at one another.
My daughter Ellen whispered:
“Mom, you don’t have to prove anything.”
“I’m not.”
Walter’s oldest son, Peter, asked his father’s attorney whether the marriage changed the estate.
Walter heard him.
“Peter.”
His voice was weak.
“Dad, I’m just making sure—”
