I got my husband his dream watch for our tenth anniversary. All he got me was cheap perfume in a plastic bottle. I was so angry I tossed it aside and never used it. That was our last celebration. He died unexpectedly three weeks later. Today I was cleaning and the bottle fell. I froze. Inside, he was hiding a folded note and a thin gold chain.

The note was short. He wrote that the perfume was a joke he had meant to explain over dinner, and that the real gift was the chain, which had belonged to his mother. He had been afraid I would say it was too much, so he had put it in the bottle and planned to tell me when I opened it. He never got the chance. The chain was still coiled at the bottom, the clasp closed the way he always closed things carefully.