Chapter 2 - The Love They Tried to Bury
I had returned to Marietta, Ohio, because I was running out of money.
There was nothing romantic about it.
My pension barely covered rent and prescription costs in Columbus, and the private nursing agency where I occasionally worked had reduced its hours. When Marietta Memorial offered me a temporary patient-care position, I packed my belongings into a ten-year-old Buick and moved back to the town I had spent most of my life avoiding.
Three weeks later, I walked into Room 412 carrying a blood-pressure cuff.
The name on the chart stopped me at the door.
Thomas Whitaker.
He was seventy-four, though cancer had made him look older. His shoulders had narrowed beneath the hospital gown. His once-dark hair was silver, and the strong hands I remembered were thin against the blanket.
But when he opened his eyes, I saw the boy who had kissed me behind the high school football bleachers.
“Nancy Brooks,” he said.
No one had spoken my maiden name with that kind of warmth in decades.
I should have requested another patient.
Instead, I checked his blood pressure, adjusted his blankets, and asked whether he was in pain.
“Not anymore,” he said.
Thomas had inherited his father’s building-supply company and turned it into one of the largest employers in Washington County. He had money, a respected name, and a sprawling brick house overlooking the river.
What he did not have was a wife or children.
I had never married either.
There had been relationships. A kind accountant in Dayton. A widowed teacher in Columbus. A surgeon who believed every room belonged to him. None of them lasted.
Thomas and I did not speak about the bus station during our first few conversations. We talked about ordinary things—teachers we remembered, stores that had disappeared, the bakery where his mother used to buy cinnamon rolls after church.
Then, one rainy afternoon, he asked the question both of us had been avoiding.
“Did you ever think about coming back?”
“I did come back.”
“I mean for me.”
I looked down at the blanket.
“I wrote you.”
His face changed.
“No, you didn’t.”
“Seven times.”
“Nancy, I waited almost a year.”
“Your mother told me you were seeing someone.”
“My mother?”
“She called my dorm.”
Thomas became very still.
“My mother told me you never contacted me. She said you were embarrassed by me.”
We sat there with the rain tapping against the hospital window, each of us realizing how easily two lives had been redirected.
Thomas reached for my hand.
“I should have come after you.”
“I should have come home.”
“We were seventeen.”
“That doesn’t make it hurt less.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
After that day, our conversations deepened quickly. Cancer had stripped away his patience for polite distance. Age had stripped away mine.
He told me he had spent most of his life proving he did not need anyone. I admitted that I had mistaken independence for safety.
Then Caroline appeared.
She entered Thomas’s room wearing a tailored red coat and stopped when she saw our hands together.
Caroline was five years younger than Thomas. I remembered her as a solemn child who followed us through the Whitaker house, listening from doorways.
As an adult, she had the polished manners of a woman who considered every conversation a negotiation.
“Nancy Brooks,” she said. “How unexpected.”
“Hello, Caroline.”
She kissed Thomas on the cheek and set her purse on the chair between us.
Outside the room, she cornered me near the nurses’ station.
“My brother is vulnerable.”
“He is also mentally competent.”
“You are an employee.”
“I’m a nurse.”
“You’re a woman he once loved. That makes this worse.”
“I didn’t arrange his diagnosis.”
Her smile disappeared.
“Thomas supports a great many people. His decisions affect more than his feelings.”
That was the first warning.
The second came from Brent.
He was forty-seven, broad-shouldered and always slightly overdressed. Thomas had made him executive vice president of Whitaker Building Supply despite private complaints from employees about Brent’s temper and reckless spending.
He found me in the hospital cafeteria.
“My uncle is worth almost twelve million dollars,” he said, sitting down without permission. “I thought you should know that before you pretend money isn’t part of this.”
“I knew him when he delivered lumber in his father’s truck.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“So was the last time anyone taught you manners.”
He smiled, but his eyes remained cold.
“You leave town now, I’ll cover your moving costs.”
I stood.
“Tell your mother she raised a coward. Brave men make their own threats.”
Two days later, Thomas proposed.
He did not offer a diamond or kneel beside the hospital bed. He simply held my hand and said, “I lost fifty-six years because other people made choices for us. I won’t lose the time I have left.”
I knew how it would look.
An elderly nurse marrying a wealthy terminal patient would invite suspicion even in the kindest family. Thomas’s relatives were not kind.
I said yes anyway.
Our wedding took place in his hospital room. A chaplain performed the ceremony. Daniel stood as Thomas’s witness. My former supervisor, Lena, held a small bouquet of white roses.
Caroline and Brent refused to attend.
Thomas wore a pale gray suit over his weakened frame. I wore an old lace dress borrowed from a friend.
When he placed the ring on my finger, his hand shook.
“I loved you when I was seventeen,” he said. “I love you now. I’m sorry I let silence decide our lives.”
For twenty-eight days, I visited him every morning as his wife instead of his nurse.
We talked. We argued about whether he was eating enough. We watched baseball. I rubbed lotion into his dry hands and slept in a chair when his breathing became difficult.
He never discussed his will.
He never told me about stolen money.
And he never said that our marriage was part of a plan.
The night before he died, Thomas woke shortly after two in the morning.
“Caroline knew,” he whispered.
“Knew what?”
“About the letters.”
I leaned closer, but his eyes had already closed.
May you like
At the time, I thought he was confused from medication.
The morning after his funeral, with Caroline pounding on my door and those stolen letters inside Thomas’s box, I understood that his mind had been painfully clear.
