He knew. He knew exactly what I would find there, and exactly what he was asking me to do.
I shook Gini’s hand.
“I’ll be back in two days,” I told her and the doctor.
***
I came back with the money for the operation.
Harold and I had always been thrifty, and what I spent was what we had saved together. Using that money felt less like a decision and more like completing a project initiated by Harold.
The operation lasted six hours. Everything went well.
He knew exactly what I would find there.
When Gini’s mother was strong enough to sit up and receive visitors, I went into her room and introduced myself as Rosa, Harold’s wife.
She stared at me for a long time. Then her face fell. “Your husband saved us,” she said. “My daughter and I wouldn’t be here without him.”
I held her hand and didn’t say much, because a question was still nagging at me.
Harold had carried these people in his arms all his life. He had loved me faithfully for 62 years. And he had never breathed a word of it.
For what?
There was one question that I couldn’t resolve.
A few days later, after Gini’s mother returned home, she invited me to their house.
She took out an old photo album that she had kept for years, and I slowly turned the pages, watching a childhood unfold through the photographs: a girl growing up, class photos and holiday snapshots.
Then I turned another page, and it took my breath away.
It was a photo of young Harold, standing in front of what appeared to be a boarding house. Next to him stood a teenage girl holding a newborn baby; both were squinting in the sunlight.
I knew this girl. I grew up in the same house as her.
I knew that girl.
It was my older sister, Iris. The one who left home when I was fifteen and never came back. The one my parents never spoke about until the end of their days, because reopening that wound was too painful.
“That’s my mother,” said Virginia, Gini’s mother, softly. “She passed away 12 years ago.”
The photo slipped from my hands as tears welled up in my eyes.
“Are you okay?” Virginia asked, reaching out to catch me before I collapsed.
I closed the album.
“I have to go home,” I said.
“She passed away 12 years ago.”
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