It was somewhere back across a decade of drift.

And I began to understand that we were not going to grow old together in any way worth the words.

We were going to grow old in the same house, separately, politely, each alone, and then one of us would die and the other would grieve a person they had actually lost years before, and I could not — I found, to my own surprise, that I simply could not — accept that as the end of the story.

Chapter 5 — The Shoebox