I believed saying goodbye to the man I had loved for most of my life would be the most painful thing I would ever endure. I was wrong. The true reason Thomas had returned to me was not revealed until after he was gone.

Rain tapped gently against the window of my small rented apartment as I stirred a cup of instant coffee. At seventy-three, I had returned to the town I left when I was seventeen. My pension was not enough to cover rising rent, so I took my old nursing badge from a drawer, bought a new uniform, and returned to work at the local hospital.

I had never married and never had children. There had been a few kind men over the years, but none of them had ever been Thomas. We were both seventeen when we met, young enough to believe promises could last forever. When I earned a place at a college in another city, Thomas chose to remain in town. On the day I left, he begged me not to go, calling me a heartbreaker. Those were almost the last words he ever said to me as I boarded the bus, spending the next fifty-six years believing I would never see him again.

The ringing telephone pulled me out of the memory. It was Raymond, my distant cousin. Ever since I returned to town, he had started calling nearly every week. His voice was friendly, but his questions made me uncomfortable: “How’s the apartment? Have you organized your paperwork? Your will? Family should take care of family.”

Something about the way he spoke made my coffee taste bitter. I ended the call and hurried off to my shift at the hospital.

That morning, pushing my cart down the long hallway, I stopped outside Room 220, a new long-term care patient. I checked the chart. The first name made me stop breathing: Thomas.

When I raised my eyes toward the patient lying in the bed, I recognized him immediately. Fifty-six years had passed, but they had not erased his face. Thomas was thinner, pale, and ill, but those eyes were still the same ones that had watched me board a bus all those years ago. He smiled as though he had been expecting me.

“Hello, Nancy,” he said softly.

For several seconds, I could not speak. “Thomas,” I finally whispered. “Oh my goodness. Thomas.”

After that day, I found reasons to visit his room during every shift. Thomas told me he had never married either, and we laughed about our gray hair and aching knees while enjoying the comfortable silence of lost decades.

One morning, he asked a careful question: “Do you have any family nearby, Nancy? Anyone helping you?”

“Only a distant cousin named Raymond. He has been calling more often since I moved back.”

For one brief moment, Thomas’s jaw tightened before he quickly changed the subject. That same week, Raymond’s calls became even more persistent, asking about my bank accounts, wills, and whether I owned the apartment, proudly mentioning how he had handled Aunt Margaret’s affairs near the end of her life. I remembered Margaret had died almost penniless in a rented room, and a cold feeling moved through me.

Then, one afternoon, Thomas asked me to sit beside him, his hand finding mine on top of the blanket. “Nancy,” he said with deep seriousness, “I feel terrible asking this… I have loved you for my entire life. Will you marry me?”…