I am 78 years old, and I thought my life had already been through all the twists it could have. My days are quiet now… tea in the afternoon, birds in the garden, memories tucked away in photo albums. Nothing ever happens anymore. At least, that is what I believed.
Then the doorbell rang. I was not expecting anyone. When I opened it, my breath caught in my chest. Standing there on my doorstep was Nathan — my first love. The man who disappeared from my life FIFTY years ago without a word. The man I once planned to marry.
Time had changed his face, but his eyes? They were identical. The same eyes that once told me I was his forever before he vanished, leaving me to pick up the pieces of a future we were supposed to share.
He looked right at me and said quietly, as if no time had passed, “Did you ever find the letter?”
My hands began to tremble. “What letter? You left, Nathan. You just left.”
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a yellowed, unopened envelope. “The one I slipped under your door the night I left,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “I wrote that I was going north to work in the mines, to save enough money to buy us a house. I asked you to wait one year. I came back, Mary. I came back exactly one year later.”
“But…” I stammered, tears blurring my vision. “My father… he told me you ran off with another girl.”
Nathan closed his eyes, a look of fifty years of pain washing over him. “And he told me you had moved on. He handed me this letter back, sealed. He said you didn’t even want to open it.”
We stood there in silence, half a century of stolen time hanging between us. A lie had kept us apart for a lifetime.
“I married a good man,” I told him softly. “I had a good life. But I never stopped wondering.”
“I never married,” Nathan said, taking a shaky step forward. “I couldn’t. Not when I didn’t know why you stopped loving me.”
He held out his hand—not the smooth hand of the boy I knew, but the weathered hand of the man who had loved me from afar for a lifetime.
“I know I’m fifty years late,” he smiled through his tears. “But the offer in that letter still stands. Would you like to go get that coffee now?”
I looked at him, and for the first time in decades, I didn’t feel old. I felt like I was twenty-eight again.
“Yes,” I said, opening the door wide. “Better late than never.”
