Because there are two men available in this story and I have met both of them.

The first is a lonely, decent, articulate man of seventy-one who wanted, once, to be somebody’s husband, who told one lie to get it, who knew it was wrong before the afternoon was out, and who spent some of his last conscious hours writing four pages of honest self-accounting to a woman he liked.

The second is a man who worked in a county building for twenty-eight years, who understood better than almost anybody alive what a marriage certificate does, who was carrying a forty-one-thousand-dollar hospital account he could not pay, and who acquired a solvent thirty-two-year-old accountant as his legal spouse thirty-four days later.

Those two men wrote the same letter.