she had time to censor herself. “At least I always thought he did.”
“What do you mean?”
Here goes, she thought. “Because he never actually disappeared. He comes back every year.”
Francine shook her head with disbelief. “What? Have you finally lost the plot?”
“I’m serious.”
“Elizabeth, darling, we haven’t seen hide nor hair of him for what now?” she said, pausing to think. “It must be fifty years.”
“I know we haven’t, but he still comes. I know it’s him. He leaves me gifts on the doorstep.”
Francine was quiet, trying to comprehend what she had just heard. “What does he bring?” Her tone suggested she was humoring her friend.
“Don’t say it like that, as if I’ve gone mad. Every year he brings me a blue crocus, just like he promised me he would. He always writes me a wish too, something we would have done together. And if you don’t believe me, I’ve got every one of those forty-nine wishes at home. It’s him, I’m telling you. I even saw him once or twice.”
Something changed in Francine’s tone, realizing the seriousness with which Elizabeth spoke. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I believe you.”
“Good.”
Francine sat back in her chair, her mouth hanging limp and wide with disbelief. “Didn’t he get married?”
Elizabeth closed her eyes, felt the same spark of guilt and jealousy that always stirred when she thought of his wife. “He did.”
“And he still holds a candle for you?” she asked of nobody, shaking her head. “Cheeky old bugger.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Well,” said Francine, looking less than pleased with what she had learned. “I don’t know what it’s like, but it’s obviously done you no good. Look how upset you are.”
Elizabeth pulled a tissue from her pocket and wiped her eyes. “I’m not upset because he brings me presents every year.”
“Then why are you upset?”
“Because this year, he forgot.”
Francine drummed her nails against the brushed metal table. After a moment she shook her head. “Unlikely, if he never forgot before. Elizabeth, I hate to remind you, but none of us are getting any younger. I’ve just had a hip replaced, and your fingers are full of arthritis.”
“What are you saying?”
“Only that you don’t hand deliver a gift to a girl you were in love with when you were eighteen, for forty-nine years, even when you’re married to somebody else, and then not bother for the fiftieth.”
Elizabeth had been so preoccupied with how hurt she was, she’d never stopped to wonder why he had failed to deliver the present. “You don’t think . . .” The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end as the thought came to her, her mouth too dry to finish the sentence. Until today, Tom looked to her mind like the boy in the only photograph she had of him, but he’d be sixty-eight now. People she knew had died younger than that.
“Only one way to find out,” Francine said. “Why don’t you try to get in touch?”
“Well, I have his phone number, but what if his wife answers? Or his daughter?” Elizabeth had always kept his address and phone number written down, but she had never used either out of respect for the fact she knew he had a family. “How would I explain who I am?”
“I’d say that doesn’t really matter if it comes to the worst. Just tell them you’re an old friend from Porthsennen.”
With some regret, Elizabeth realized that the truth was not all that different.
* * *
Her heart raced as she hurried along the road back to her cottage, the keys jangling in her pocket. Her fingers fumbled to find them, and after some effort she opened the front door. Cookie arrived at her feet, his cue the sound of the lock, his fur warm and his purring loud as he rubbed at her ankles.
“I haven’t got time for your nonsense now,” she said, nudging him away. Her fingers wouldn’t seem to grip the handle of the cupboard alongside the fireplace as she crouched down, too stiff from the cold, too arthritic from age. Taking a breath to calm herself, she focused, managed to get it open and pull out the basket containing every one of Tom’s wishes. They scattered like autumn leaves on the floor. “I’m so stupid,” she told Cookie. “How could I not have even considered it?”
All her life she had been plagued by the thoughts of “what if?” What if they could have been together? What if they had never argued that night? What if Tom had never gone to