By eleven o’clock, I was back in the old station I’d avoided for half a century, clutching the roses and the yellow dress I’d once worn like sunlight. I expected a ghost and found, instead, Adrian—ruined by time, carrying James’s duffel bag like a confession. The note in “James’s” voice was his, the trap he’d set to drag me here. And then came the wound beneath the lie: James had not died in the clean instant I’d imagined for fifty six years. He and Adrian had been captured; my husband had lived for weeks, hurt and afraid, folding that pathetic paper rose in a place I could not bear to picture. He had begged Adrian first to spare me the truth, then, at the end, to give it back to me in full. Adrian had done neither. Out of shame, out of cowardice, out of a selfish terror of his own guilt, he had kept my husband’s last weeks, his grave, even the location of his bones, hidden from me for decades. And now, with his own death finally stalking him, he had come to return what he’d stolen, piece by jagged piece, and ask me to carry a weight he had never had the courage to bear himself. My rage, my grief, my need to know—none of it could bring James back. But it could, at last, bring me to where he lay, and to the terrible, necessary truth of how he’d left this world, and why his promise of yellow roses had taken fifty six years to fi… Continues…