And when you spend enough years comparing everything to one thing you lost, you begin living beside your life instead of inside it.

I had no children.

No close family remained except a few distant cousins who received Christmas cards from me more out of habit than affection.

I drank coffee at six and watched the news at seven.

I walked when my knees permitted it.

My evenings passed in an armchair with a book or the radio.

My life had become small enough to hold in two hands.

Then, six months earlier, I found Margaret’s name online.

I had been searching for an old high-school classmate, which is the kind of thing a man does when he has too much time and too many memories.

My mind was crowded with people I once assumed would remain young forever, and I only wanted to see what had become of them.

I searched one name, then another.

While scrolling, Margaret appeared under People You May Know.

I stared at the screen until my tea turned cold.

Her profile showed a phone number and several photographs.

There was enough proof to show she was real, somewhere beneath the same sky, still breathing after all those years.

I had no intention of calling.

At least that was what I told myself for three days.

Then, on a Tuesday evening, with my hands trembling as though I were nineteen again, I dialed.

She answered on the fourth ring.

Time is strange.

It had worn both of us down, but it had not erased us.

Her voice was lower than I remembered, perhaps softer, but unmistakably hers.

Something inside my chest nearly broke.

“Margaret? It’s Harrison,” I said.

A pause followed.

Then, quietly: “Harrison?”

Neither of us planned for the conversation to continue.

We simply kept discovering one more thing to say.

Another name from our past.

Another memory.

Another apology that had spent too many years ripening.