“She was a good woman.”
The words came with difficulty.
That was how I knew they were true.
A staff member greeted us outside Benjamin’s room.
“He may not recognize you, Isobel. Please don’t pressure him. If he becomes distressed, we’ll have to end the visit.”
I nodded quietly.
For sixty-two years, Benjamin had remained eighteen in my memories, with dark hair, broad shoulders, and warm hands wrapped around mine.
Behind that door waited an eighty-year-old man I no longer knew.
“What if there’s nothing left of us?”
Edward’s face softened.
“You don’t have to go in.”
Wren squeezed my hand.
I shook my head.
“No. I didn’t come all this way to be brave in a hallway.”
Benjamin sat beside the window in a wheelchair.
A moment later, he turned toward us.
His eyes were still blue.
Before my mind accepted it, my heart already knew him.
“Dad, someone came to see you.”
Benjamin looked at me with quiet politeness.
The hope I had carried inside me slowly folded into silence.
“No. My name is Isobel.”
“Isobel,” he repeated.
There was no spark of recognition.
I sat beside him and opened the blue box.
He studied the silver ring.
“Pretty.”
Edward stepped forward, but I gently raised my hand to stop him.
I didn’t want anyone protecting me from reality.
“Do you remember a willow tree?”
Benjamin frowned.
“A yellow dress?”
His fingers began lightly tapping the blanket.
“That’s enough for today.”
In the hallway, I rested against the wall, unable to steady myself.
Wren wrapped both arms around me.
“Oh, Aunt Isobel,” she whispered.
“He came back,” I said quietly, “but the part of him that remembered me never did.”
Edward wiped away tears with the back of his hand.
“Can I come back and see him again?”
He stared at me in surprise.
“You still want to?”
