The lawyer handed me a second, older envelope, its seal long broken, addressed to Rosalind in my grandfather’s handwriting. It had arrived in 1959, but her father intercepted it and hid it in his desk. She only found it after he died, thirty years later. In it, Grandpa wrote that he had been badly injured in a training accident overseas and believed she deserved a whole man. He released her from the engagement and begged her to forget him.

By the time Rosalind read it, my grandfather had married my grandmother and raised a family. She never contacted him. She never married anyone else either. Grandpa died eleven years ago, never knowing she had read his words. When I walked into the hospice wearing a volunteer badge with the name Avery on it, she recognized his face in mine immediately. Her final wish was to be his bride, and I was the closest she would ever come.

Her last letter, written to me a week before she died, asked me not to feel deceived. She wrote that I had given her the afternoon she had waited her whole life for, and that I had done it out of pure kindness, without knowing a thing. That was what made it real. She left me her small house by the river and enough money to finish the nursing degree I had told her about.

That spring, I visited my grandfather’s grave and read him the letter he never knew she found. Then I drove across town and laid white roses on Rosalind’s. I kept the photograph on my bookshelf, right beside his old picture, where they finally stand together. I graduated last May. I work in hospice care now, and every time a patient tells me a regret, I listen a little harder.