“The liver failure was real. The month was real. What I lied about was why I asked you to  marry me.”

I lowered the letter.

Then immediately picked it up again.

“My arrangements were already taken care of. Hospice or the county would have handled the paperwork. I wasn’t going to disappear without a name.”

I stood so quickly my chair scraped across the floor.

“What did you do, Larry?”

There was nowhere for my anger to go.

He was dead.

I couldn’t call him.

I couldn’t demand an explanation.

I couldn’t even force him to sit across from me and watch the expression on my face.

I kept reading.

“If I gave you a problem you could solve, I knew you would solve it.”

That sentence hurt the most.

Because it was true.

For two years, I had constantly offered Larry things.

Coffee.

Food.

Warm socks.

Shelter phone numbers.

Once, during a brutal cold spell, I spent half my lunch break calling shelters until I found an available bed.

Larry always thanked me.

But it had never occurred to me that during those two years, he had also learned something about me.

He had learned exactly how to ask me for help.

Near the bottom of the page, he had written:

“Before you decide what kind of jerk I was, go back to the courthouse where we got  married. Ask for Margaret. Tell her you’re my wife.”

For a few minutes, I seriously considered throwing the letter away.

Instead, an hour later, I was standing inside the courthouse lobby.

Couples filled the plastic chairs.

A woman in a white jumpsuit adjusted her lipstick while her fiancé held a bouquet.

A toddler crawled beneath a row of seats while his father tried to catch him.

Three weeks earlier, Larry and I had sat in those same chairs.

I remembered him rubbing his palms against his trousers again and again.

“You’re shaking,” I had told him.