Elaine died last spring. Then his doctors told him his heart was failing. Marisa drove him to Carson City on Thursday so he could order the flowers himself. The 530 number was Marisa’s phone; she had hung up out of panic. He only wanted me to know he had lived, and that he never stopped loving me. He didn’t want me to see him like this, afraid the scars would be the last thing I remembered. He had always underestimated me.

I stayed until dark, and we read his forty-three letters together, one by one, the same way I had read mine. I drove up every weekend after that. My daughter came with me the second time and cried harder than I did. Bobby passed in March, holding my hand, with a dandelion in a jar beside his bed. His letters now sit beside mine in the old Whitman’s box, in my cedar chest, where they finally belong together.