At sixty-seven, I took my first trip alone.
I chose Malta because Michael and I had once circled it in a travel magazine and promised we would visit “someday.”
Someday never came.
Four years after Michael was gone, I finally booked the ticket myself.
Before I left, my daughter, Rebecca, hugged me at the airport and made me promise one thing.
“Say yes to something you would normally refuse.”
So I did.
I said yes to unfamiliar food.
I said yes to getting on a boat even though deep water made me uneasy.
I said yes to dancing badly in a crowded square while strangers clapped along.
And when a charming seventy-year-old man named David offered to help me after finding me on a Valletta street with my map turned upside down, I said yes to coffee.
Then breakfast.
Then a ferry ride to Gozo.
And finally, dinner on the last evening of my trip.
By then, I had begun to believe that life might be giving me something I thought I had lost forever.
Then I followed David into a restaurant courtyard and heard the truth.
“You have to tell her tonight,” a woman said.
I stopped beneath a stone archway.
David stood with his back to me under a string of warm yellow lights. Across from him was a woman in her forties.
She had the same gray-blue eyes he did.
“I know,” David replied.
“You should have told her the moment you recognized her.”
My hand tightened against the stone wall.
Recognized me?
David lowered his voice.
“I didn’t expect to fall in love with her.”
