Good grief, I was harsh. The memory of our love. But I was honest too. I never did hear back from him. Just his signature on the papers his lawyer sent, and then silence. Fifty years of silence. And then one day a package in the mail from a Mrs Laura Jackson in Floyd, Virginia. Inside was a little card with neat handwriting:

Dear Mrs Rice,

My husband Roy Jackson passed away last Christmas after a prolonged battle with lung cancer. He asked in his will that these letters be returned to you. He told me about you when we first met, at church, and how it broke his heart when you left. But I think over the years he came to understand it was for the best, and we had forty years of blessed marriage. His mother and father died in 1962 and 1963, leaving the farm to us, and we sold it to a housing developer and bought some land southwest of there, where we raised horses.

I do hope you found happiness as well and that these letters find you in good health.

Sincerely,

Mrs Laura Jackson

Horses. So he felt it too, that sorrow, and my regret then was big enough to eat my own heart. Too late, too late, it beat in my chest, the memories rushing back in no order: Roy in his uniform when we first met, the bruise on his cheek, the freckles across the bridge of his snub American nose. I had been young and foolish. The return of the letters did what I’m certain he intended. They made me realise how cruel I had been.

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 30

I tell myself I’m crying for the horses. For Roy. For all that Grandma lost, and for what she was strong enough to leave. But I’m crying too because of the calories. The food I cannot control. The past that keeps coming back unbidden, because when I’m not hungry my thoughts are filled with things other than food.

New Zealand has come and gone; in two more days we dock in Sydney. I am out of the infirmary now, though I have to return twice a day to be weighed, to have my pulse taken and my blood pressure checked. Since he learned I’m in nursing school the doctor and I have found some common ground. He lets me take my own blood pressure, he gives me little tasks if I ask for them. He quizzes me about medications, conditions. Today he looks at me strangely after taking my blood pressure and vitals, and when I ask what is up he says he wants to understand why an intelligent person would knowingly cause their body irreparable harm.