I asked the funeral director to tell me the woman’s initials again, and they matched the initials engraved beside my husband’s on the ring. I knew exactly who she was. She had sung at our wedding in 1981, had stood in the third row at the visitation, and had hugged my husband’s hand before she left. I called her that afternoon and asked why her initials were inside a ring dated from the year I married him. She said she’d given him the ring herself, but she hadn’t seen it since 1981. Then she asked whether he’d been wearing it when he died. I said yes. She started crying and told me she’d spent forty years believing he’d thrown it away.
I asked what the date inside meant. She said it was the date my husband promised her something, three months before our wedding. I told her that couldn’t be right because we’d already been engaged. She said she knew. Then she told me they’d met secretly for months because he had promised to leave me before the wedding, but when he didn’t, she married someone else and moved away. I asked why she had come to his visitation. She said he’d called her six weeks before he died and told her he finally had to tell me the truth. I asked what truth. She wouldn’t say it over the phone. She only asked whether I’d found anything else among his personal effects. I told her no. Then she said, “Check the lining of his old suit. He kept the letter there because he was too frightened to give it to you.”
I went home and opened the garment bag I’d kept since the funeral. The suit was still exactly where I’d left it, and inside the breast pocket was an envelope with my name on it. The letter was dated two weeks before his death. He wrote that he’d spent thirty-nine years trying to protect me from something that began before our marriage, and that the ring wasn’t a reminder of another woman — it was proof of a promise he’d broken. I kept reading until I reached the final paragraph. He said the woman wasn’t the person he’d betrayed me with. She was the person who knew what happened to the child he believed had died in 1981. At the bottom he’d written one sentence: “If she gives you the ring, ask her who was holding the baby when I walked away.”
