“I’m okay,” she whispered.

“You’re not.”

“Close enough.”

The officiant waited.

Cara straightened.

When it was her turn, she looked directly at me.

“I do.”

Two words.

After ten years of silence.

I signed the marriage certificate with a pen chained to a wooden desk.

Cara signed beneath my name.

For a long time afterward, I would remember those two signatures sitting together on the same sheet of paper.

Ten years apart.

Then suddenly separated by less than an inch.

We Had Five Days

We didn’t take a honeymoon.

Cara couldn’t travel.

Instead, we went home.

For five days, the world became very small.

My bedroom.

The kitchen.

The couch.

The pharmacy.

The hospital number taped beside the refrigerator.

On the first morning, I made pancakes and carried them upstairs.

Cara took three bites.

“These are terrible.”

“You used to eat them.”

“I loved you then.”

I looked at her.

She smiled.

“I’m kidding.”

We watched old movies we had watched in college.

She fell asleep halfway through most of them.

On the third day, it rained.

Cara asked me to open the bedroom window.

“You’ll get cold.”

“Just a little.”

I opened it.

Rain tapped against the roof.

She closed her eyes.

“Remember that apartment on Hawthorne?”

“The one with the leaking window?”

“You put a cooking pot under it.”

“We only owned one pot.”

“Exactly.”

She laughed softly.

For a few minutes, we were twenty-three again.

Then I looked at the oxygen tube running across her cheek.

“Why did you leave?”

Her eyes opened.

I waited.

“Later.”

I stood and shut the window.

“You keep saying that.”

“I know.”

“We’re running out of later.”

She looked toward the rain.

“I know that too.”

On the fifth night, I woke because Cara was holding my wrist.

Her breathing was shallow.

I called the number the hospital had given me.

A nurse talked me through what to do.

Cara didn’t want to go back.

That had been arranged in advance.

I sat beside her.

Sometime after midnight, she opened her eyes.

“Daniel?”

“I’m here.”

Her fingers moved weakly against mine.

I leaned closer.

“Don’t go anywhere,” she whispered.

“I won’t.”

Those were the last clear words she said to me.

Cara died beside me before dawn.

Five days after our wedding.

At the funeral, I stood beside a framed photograph of her and accepted condolences from people I had never met.

They knew pieces of Cara’s last ten years that I didn’t.

That angered me more than I expected.

Near the end, Mara approached me.

She waited until everyone else had moved away.

Then she placed something in my palm.

A small brass key.

“What’s this?”

Mara looked toward Cara’s photograph.

“She told me to give it to you after the funeral.”

“What does it open?”

Mara hesitated.

“A chest in her room.”

I closed my fingers around the key.

“What’s inside?”

Mara looked directly at me.

“Letters.”

“How many?”

“One hundred and twenty-seven.”

I stopped breathing for a second.

“Letters to who?”

Mara’s face changed.

Not surprise.

Pity.

“You.”

That afternoon, she took me to the room where Cara had lived.

Against the far wall stood an old wooden chest.

The brass key fit perfectly.

Inside were bundles of envelopes tied with string.

Every one had my name on it.

None had been mailed.

I picked up the oldest envelope.

The date on the front was three days after Cara disappeared.

My hands shook as I opened it.

The first line was written in the handwriting I had spent ten years trying to forget.

I read it twice.

Then a third time.

Daniel, I found out I was pregnant the morning before I left.

The First Letter Explained the Question Cara Had Asked That Night

I sat on the floor beside Cara’s wooden chest with the first letter open across my knees.

Daniel, I found out I was pregnant the morning before I left.

For several seconds, that was all I could read.

Mara was sitting on the edge of Cara’s bed.

“Did you know?”

She looked down at her hands.

“Not then.”

I read the next paragraph.

Cara had taken the pregnancy test that morning while I was at work. She had bought two tests because she didn’t trust the first one.

Both were positive.

She had spent the afternoon trying to decide how to tell me.

Then I came home with champagne and my acceptance letter.

I remembered that night clearly.

I remembered talking about Boston.

Research.

Europe.

Everything I planned to do before settling down.

Then Cara had asked when I wanted children.

Five years?

Seven?

I had treated the question like an interruption.

The letter shook in my hands.

Cara wrote that she had almost told me three times.

Instead, she became frightened.

She convinced herself that if she told me about the pregnancy, I would stay because I felt obligated.

So the next morning, while I slept, she packed a bag and drove to her mother’s house.

She intended to stay for a few days.

Then she would call.

That was the plan.

I turned the page.

Six weeks later, Cara lost the baby.

There wasn’t much detail.

Just one paragraph.

She had started bleeding late at night. Her mother drove her to the emergency room.

By morning, there was no pregnancy anymore.

I lowered the letter.

Mara didn’t say anything.

“She never told me.”

“No.”

“I had a child.”

Mara’s eyes lifted.

“You almost did.”

I folded the letter along its original crease.

For ten years, I had thought Cara left because she didn’t want my future.

The truth was almost the opposite.

She had been afraid she would take it away from me.

It didn’t make what she did right.

That was the part I couldn’t get past.

She had decided what I wanted without asking me.

Then she had decided what I could handle.

Then she had decided I was better off never knowing.

I reached for the second letter.

She Had Tried to Come Back More Than Once

I didn’t read all 127 letters that day.

I couldn’t.

I read eleven.

Then I went home.

The next morning, I returned.

Mara gave me a key to the apartment and left me alone.

The letters weren’t written regularly.

Sometimes months passed between them.

Other times Cara wrote three in a week.

Some were only a page.

Others were ten or twelve.

The first year was mostly about the baby.

Cara wrote about waking up with one hand over her stomach before remembering there was nothing there.

She wrote that she picked up the phone dozens of times.

She never finished dialing.

About eight months after she left, she bought a train ticket to Boston.

She made it as far as the station.

Then she went home.

I found the ticket folded inside the letter.

The following year, she found the phone number for the department where I worked.

She called.

When a receptionist answered, Cara hung up.

I put the letter down.

There had been a time when I received strange hang-up calls at work.

I’d forgotten about them.

Now I wondered how many had been her.

Other letters were harder to read.