“Had he?” Mark asked. He was leaning forward, listening hard. “Had he stopped loving her?”
“No,” I said. “He loved her so much he couldn’t stand the thought of forgetting her. So he married her twice. Just to be sure.”
Mark sat back in his chair. He looked down at the ring in his palm for a long time.
Then he slid it back onto his finger. Over the bad knuckle. Click.
“That’s a good story,” he said quietly.
“It is.”
“Does it have a happy ending?”
I looked at him. This man. My husband. Who didn’t know my name, and didn’t know the lake, and didn’t know that he once sat on a dock and changed my entire life with one crazy sentence.
But who still wore the ring. Who still held his hand against his chest when anyone tried to take it. Who still, somewhere deep down, in the part of him that no disease could reach, knew that someone had chosen him.
