The woman from Kroger. The woman I stole him from in 2002. I remembered her as thin as a broom, a scarf wrapped around her head, pushing a cart containing nothing but ginger ale. For twenty years, I carried that memory without knowing why it had returned to me now. Then I stood at Winifred’s window, and suddenly the dates began making sense. Nathaniel and I had been married for three years. Rosalind had returned to the county four years earlier. The scarf. The ginger ale. The hospital parking stub. Vanderbilt. A woman losing her hair and drinking flat soda because chemotherapy wouldn’t let anything else stay down.

I didn’t understand until I went home and made Nathaniel tell me everything. He finally sat across from me at the kitchen table, our pork-chop grease growing cold between us. Rosalind had come back alone, divorced, childless, and seriously ill. Nathaniel had discovered she was dying. Then he told me what he had done for her. Click continue reading below for Part2