nearest chair so suddenly that its legs scraped loudly across the kitchen floor.
One of the real roses fell from the table.
“No,” I whispered.
“That can’t be possible.”
But the flower remained in my hand.
Old.
Fragile.
Real.
And bearing James’s initial.
For the first time in decades, a question I had spent half my life forcing myself not to ask rose inside me.
Could James somehow still be alive?
James and I had only been married for two days before he left.
Two days.
Yet somehow, those two
