reading.
The words blurred.
The wedding ring.
I remembered that.
It had been maybe five years earlier.
I had been vacuuming beneath the radiator in the upstairs bedroom when something metallic clicked inside the hose.
I’d shut the vacuum off, opened it, and dug through a disgusting collection of dust and hair until I found a gold ring.
Mrs.
Whitaker had cried when she saw it.
Harold’s wedding ring.
He had died years before I met her.
She had offered me two hundred dollars.
I refused.
“Anyone would have returned it,” I had said.
She had looked at me strangely.
Apparently, she had remembered that sentence too.
I continued reading.
There was more.
Much more.
Then I reached the final paragraph.
If money were the only thing I wanted to give you, I would simply have mailed a check.
But there is something else.
Something I have delayed telling you
