Mr. Geller held the envelope toward me.
“Sir, I’m sorry. She gave me very specific instructions. You need to read this first.”
I didn’t take it.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
He hesitated.
Then he said the words that changed everything.
“Your wife… technically wasn’t your wife. You and Irene were never legally married.”
For a second, I honestly wondered whether grief had affected my hearing.
Irene and I had celebrated our sixtieth anniversary only months earlier.
We had raised three children.
We had five grandchildren.
I had been holding her hand when she died.
“Give me the envelope.”
“Robert—”
“Give it to me.”
He did.
My name was written across the front in Irene’s handwriting.
That nearly broke me.
I had waited for letters written in that same hand while I was overseas.
I tore the envelope open.
The first sentence read:
Robert, there is something I should have told you forty-six years ago.
