And a folded paper I did not recognize until I opened it, which turned out to be a note Hal had written me in 1984, in his careful blocky engineer’s hand, that said only: Ginny — save me every slow one for the rest of your life. — H. I sat down on the hallway floor, sixty-three years old, and I wept over a shoebox, because I was looking at two people who had promised each other every slow dance for the rest of their lives, and who had then quietly, without malice, without ever noticing, stopped dancing altogether about twenty-five years ago. Save me every slow one. I had not danced with my husband since our youngest’s wedding, and barely then.

And something in me, sitting on that floor, refused.

Refused to let those two laughing kids in the photographs have promised each other a whole life and been abandoned by the tired strangers we’d become.

It was not too late.

I did not know if that was true.

But I decided, on the hallway floor, to act as though it were.

I sat there a long time with that note in my hand, and what struck me, what I could not get past, was the confidence of it. Save me every slow one for the rest of your life. The boy who wrote that had no doubt at all.