Part 2:

My breath caught.

“I know I don’t have much time left,” he continued. “But there is one thing I always dreamed of doing.”

He looked directly into my eyes.

“Will you marry me?”

For several seconds, the room disappeared.

Fifty-six years of questions, regrets, and imagined possibilities seemed to gather between us.

Part of me heard Raymond’s voice warning me that I was being foolish.

But another voice—the voice of the seventeen-year-old girl I had once been—told me not to walk away again.

Thomas had advanced cancer.

He knew he was dying.

This was his final wish.

“Yes,” I whispered.

Tears filled his eyes.

Mine did too.

“Yes, Thomas. I’ll marry you.”

He squeezed my hand.