“Deal.”
Eight weeks later he left for Kell State, three hundred miles away.
At first we wrote constantly. Then less. Then a letter took a month.
And by the time I had worked out — properly worked out, sitting on the end of my bed at twenty — that I had been in love with him since I was seventeen, Gil was writing to me about a girl he had met at college.
In the August of 1986 one last letter came.
He was getting married.
And at the bottom, in a different-coloured pen, he asked me not to contact him again.
I cried for about three weeks and then I did what he asked, because he had asked.
I never married. When people asked why, I said I never met the right one, which is the sentence
