Rosalind Acker. The woman from Kroger. The woman I stole him from in 2002. I remembered her as thin as a broom, a scarf around her head, pushing a cart with nothing but ginger ale. For twenty years, I carried that image and the guilt attached to it. Then I stood at Winifred’s window, and the dates suddenly made sense. Nathaniel and I had been married 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 would not let anything else stay down.

I went home and made Nathaniel tell me everything. He finally sat at the kitchen table while our pork-chop grease went cold. Rosalind had returned alone, divorced, childless, and dying. She had no family left. Nathaniel was the only person from her old life she still knew. She had not returned for him; she had come home to die somewhere familiar. Then Nathaniel told me what he had done for her. Click continue reading below for Part2