Harrison had spent hours on a bus imagining the moment he would finally see his first love again after fifty years of regret. But during a roadside stop, an unfamiliar woman called and begged him to say he had not arrived yet, turning the journey into something far more urgent than a reunion.
Margaret was my first love.
The only woman I ever truly believed I was supposed to grow old beside.
But fifty years earlier, I let her leave.
I never stopped loving her. That would have been easier to survive.
I let her go because I was young, proud, and foolish in the particular way men sometimes are.
Margaret had the chance to leave our small town and build a better future than anything I believed I could give her.
So I convinced myself I was doing something noble.
I told myself love meant stepping aside and allowing her to go.
What I really did was break both our hearts and call it sacrifice.
I never married.
I nearly married a woman from church who loved the same books I did, and later a widow in my forties who smelled of lavender and laughed with her entire body.
But whenever life began asking something permanent of me, I pulled away.
Neither woman was unkind or unworthy.
They simply were not Margaret.
