I’d been sitting in that coffee shop for twenty minutes before he came in.

Wren had called me the night before. She’d been strange on the phone. Too cheerful.

“Let’s get coffee tomorrow before you go out to the tree,” she’d said. “The Marigold. On Fifth. Ten o’clock. My treat.”

“You hate the Marigold. You say the muffins taste like sawdust.”

“I’ve changed my mind about the muffins.”

I should have known then. Wren has never changed her mind about anything in forty-two years. But I was tired, and it was the fifteenth of June, and on the fifteenth of June I am always a little bit somewhere else.

So I’d gone. I’d bought my carnations at the florist on the corner first, like always. Twelve red carnations wrapped in white paper. I’d ordered a coffee I didn’t want. I’d sat by the window and waited for Wren.

And instead, a man in a blue windbreaker had walked in, looked around the room, seen me, and gone pale.

He’d stood there by the door for almost a full minute. Then he’d walked straight to my table and asked if I was Isobel Carver.

I’d said yes.

He’d sat down. He’d set the box on the table.

And now here we were.

I lifted the lid.

Inside, on a bed of yellowed tissue paper, was a silver ring.

Not a diamond. Benjamin never had diamond money, and I never once wanted it. It was a thin silver band, with a small flat surface on top. Engraved on that flat part, very small, were two sets of initials. B.H. and I.C.

A man at the pawn shop on Delaware Street had scratched them in for two dollars extra. I’d stood next to Benjamin at the counter and watched him do it. Benjamin had counted out the two dollars in quarters.

Underneath the ring was a photograph. So faded that the yellow had gone almost white.

Me at eighteen. In that dress. Standing under the willow tree in Miller’s field. Benjamin behind me, both his arms wrapped around my waist, his chin resting on the top of my head. He was laughing at something outside the frame.

I knew what he was laughing at. His cousin Danny had been trying to work the camera and had dropped the lens cap in a puddle.

I turned the photograph over.

His handwriting. That awful slanted handwriting his mother used to say looked like a fence in a windstorm.

Isobel, I will come home to you.

Seven words.

The chair seemed to shift under me. The whole room tipped about two degrees and then held.

I put my hand flat on the table.

At the next table over, a little girl sat with her mother. Six, maybe seven years old, with a paper cup of chocolate ice cream going soft in front of her. She had chocolate on her chin.

She looked up at me.

Then she slid off her chair, walked the two steps over to our table, and pushed a clean napkin across to me.

“Here,” she whispered.

I took it. I pressed it to my mouth.

And that’s what did it, if you want to know. Not the ring. Not the photograph. Not the seven words.

It was a child I’d never met, deciding that a stranger needed a napkin.

I started to cry. Right there in the Marigold, with the espresso machine hissing and the radio playing something by the Eagles.

The little girl’s mother whispered, “Sorry,” and pulled her back to their table.

“No,” I said through the napkin. “Don’t be sorry. Thank you, sweetheart.”

The little girl smiled at me with chocolate on her teeth.