Chapter 3: The Last Entry
The final line of the journal read:
*"I never stopped.
Not for a single day.
And I am sorry I was too much of a coward to tell you while I still had the chance."*
I set the journal down on the kitchen table.
My coffee had gone cold.
I hadn't touched it.
I sat there for a long time, looking at his handwriting.
The letters were unsteady near the end.
The pen had pressed harder in some places, lighter in others.
Like he had been fighting to keep his hand moving.
I picked up the letter again and read it from the beginning.
Thomas had been twenty-two when the doctors found something in his chest.
A mass.
They told him he had months, possibly less.
He had no family with money.
No insurance that would cover what was coming.
He had nothing to offer me except a slow and painful ending.
So he made a decision without asking me.
He wrote the letter.
He said he'd made his choice.
And he left before I could argue.
"I told myself it was for you," he wrote.
"But I know now it was also for me.
I couldn't bear to watch you grieve something that hadn't happened yet.
I couldn't bear to see your face change when you looked at me."
I read that sentence three times.
Then I turned the page.
He had survived — not because the doctors were wrong, but because of a trial.
An experimental treatment at a hospital two states away.
A doctor who believed in a procedure nobody else would attempt.
Thomas had nothing to lose, so he agreed.
It worked.
He spent eighteen months recovering.
By the time he was well enough to come back, a year and a half had passed.
He had written me a letter — a real one, explaining everything.
He had driven to my parents' house.
But I was already engaged.
He had stood at the end of the street, he wrote, and watched the lights in the windows.
He had the letter in his coat pocket.
He stood there for nearly an hour.
Then he turned around and drove away.
"You looked happy," he wrote.
"Or I told myself you did.
Maybe I was a coward again.
I don't know.
I've never known."
I pressed my hand flat against the page.
Outside, a car passed slowly on the street.
A dog barked somewhere down the block.
The refrigerator hummed.
I thought about that night.
I had been engaged, yes.
I had been trying to be happy.
I had been telling myself every day that Thomas was gone and that this was the right thing and that I was moving forward.
I had not been happy.
I turned to the next entry in the journal.
It was dated six months later.
He had married someone else by then.
A woman named Ruth.
He wrote about her carefully, the way you write about someone you are trying to be fair to.
He said she was kind.
He said she deserved better than a man still carrying someone else in his chest.
They had stayed together for thirty-one years.
Ruth had passed eleven years ago.
I closed the journal.
My daughter called while I was sitting there.
I let it ring.
She called again.
I picked up on the fourth ring.
"Mom?
Are you okay?
You didn't answer yesterday either."
"I'm fine, sweetheart."
"What are you doing?"
I looked at the journal.
At the photograph of my eighteen-year-old self, still tucked inside the front cover.
"Reading," I said.
"Reading what?"
I didn't answer right away.
"Something Thomas left me."
The silence on her end lasted longer than it should have.
May you like
"Mom," she said finally.
"What did he leave you?"
