Larry always drank his coffee black outside the subway station where I passed every morning. For nearly two years, we had exchanged small conversations, jokes, and quiet moments. Then one Tuesday, I noticed how badly he was shaking. A cardboard sign beside him explained everything: the doctors believed his liver was failing, and he might have only a month left. When Larry asked me to marry him, I thought he simply wanted someone legally responsible for his final arrangements. He told me he was terrified of dying without anyone who could say he belonged somewhere. I was single, he was dying, and I had always been the person who solved difficult problems instead of walking away from them. Two days later, we went to the courthouse. Larry wore a borrowed blue shirt, and I wore my work dress. Eleven minutes later, we were husband and wife.

Three weeks after our wedding, I sat beside Larry in hospice and held his hand until his breathing stopped. Six days after his funeral, a letter arrived in his unmistakable, trembling handwriting. I expected a goodbye. Instead, the first sentence made my stomach tighten: “Sarah, I need to apologize before I thank you.” Then came the words that changed everything. Larry admitted his illness had been real, but the reason he had asked me to marry him was not what he had told me. He said his burial arrangements were already handled and that he never needed me to save him from becoming a nameless body. He had simply known I would respond to a problem I could solve. Then he instructed me to return to the courthouse where we had married and ask for a woman named Margaret. He promised that she would explain something he had never told me. I grabbed my coat and headed straight back there.