“There’s something I should have told you before we got married,” he said quietly.
“I wasn’t kept away from you for fifty-five years because of the war. Not entirely, anyway.”
He drew a slow, shaking breath.
“I came home long before today, Corinne. I tried to find you a few years after I left, once my memory was finally steady enough to trust. But someone made sure we’d never find each other.”
The name he said next made me go pale.
“Patrice.”
My own sister.
Patrice was three years older than me, married young herself, still living in Thornwood when Elias’s memory finally returned enough to act on it — working the front desk at the telephone exchange office downtown, one of the few places in a small town like ours where a person could reasonably intercept a call meant for somebody else without anyone thinking twice about it.
“I called your family’s house,” Elias said. “Your mother had passed by then, and your father was living with Patrice and her husband. She’s the one who answered. I asked for you by name, told her who I was, told her I was alive and finally well enough to come find you.”
“What did she tell you?”
“She told me you’d already married,” Elias said. “Said you’d married a man named Walter about six months earlier. Said you’d built a whole life you were finally happy in, and asked me, gently as anything, not to disrupt it by showing up out of nowhere after everyone had already grieved you and moved forward.”
I sat with that for a long moment, feeling something cold and unfamiliar settle into my chest. I had never married Walter. I’d dated him briefly that same year, nothing serious enough to even call an engagement, and I’d ended things with him myself that same spring, months before Elias’s call, for reasons that had nothing to do with anyone but my own unfinished heart.
“I never married Walter,” I said. “I never married anyone, Elias. I don’t understand why she’d say that.”
