I thought helping my granddaughter clean out the attic would mean dust, old Christmas decorations, and a few embarrassing photographs from the 1980s.
I was wrong.
By the end of that afternoon, I was holding a letter written forty-two years earlier by the boy I had once planned to marry
A letter my own family had hidden from me.
It started when Ellie found my old prom album.
“Grandma!”
I turned around and immediately regretted it.
She was sitting cross-legged on the dusty floor with the album open in her lap.
“Look at your hair!”
“Oh, give me that.”
She pulled it away, laughing.
“It’s enormous.”
“It was 1984. We believed hairspray was a personality.”
She laughed harder.
I sat beside her while she flipped through the pages.
There was my mother standing stiffly beside me.
My father pretending not to be emotional.
My older brother Charlie making a ridiculous face behind my head.
Then Ellie stopped turning pages.
Her smile disappeared.
“Who’s this?”
My stomach tightened before I even looked.
David.
Forty-two years had passed, but I still recognized every detail.
His rented black tuxedo.
His crooked bow tie.
The nervous smile he always wore whenever someone pointed a camera at him.
And me beside him in a pale blue dress, looking absolutely certain that life was going to turn out exactly the way we had planned.
“His name was David,” I said quietly.
Ellie looked at me.
“Was he your boyfriend?”
“My first serious boyfriend.”
“Before Grandpa?”
“Long before Grandpa.”
She studied the photograph again.
“You were really pretty.”
“Were?”
She grinned.
David and I had been together since sophomore year.
We were the kind of teenagers who believed that because we had made a plan, the universe was somehow required to cooperate.
He worked evenings at his father’s hardware store.
I worked weekends at a bakery.
Whenever we got paid, we compared what we had saved.
One evening, David spread a pile of crumpled bills across the hood of his car.
“At this rate,” he said, “we can afford the smallest apartment in America.”
“Does it have indoor plumbing?”
He pretended to calculate.
“Luxury costs extra.”
“A window?”
“Don’t get greedy, Laura.”
Our plan was community college.
Then jobs.
Then a tiny apartment.
Nothing glamorous.
Nothing impressive.
But it was ours.
Six weeks after prom, David’s house caught fire before dawn.
I woke to my mother standing beside my bed.
