I remembered a Tuesday in November of that year. Walter had walked down to the bakery on Saginaw Street to get a loaf of rye bread. It was only four blocks away. He had been gone for nearly two hours.

When he came back, he did not have the bread. He told me the bakery was closed, but his face had been pale and his eyes looked wide and startled. I had laughed it off. I told him he was just getting forgetful in his retirement.

God. I had laughed.

Now, looking at the date on that tag, I realized what had actually happened. He had gotten lost. He had stood on a sidewalk four blocks from our home of forty years, and he had not known which way to turn. He had been terrified, and he had kept that terror entirely to himself because he did not want to scare me.

“Ma’am?” Brenda’s voice brought me back. She was holding a box of tissues out to me. “Do you want to take these back home?”

I looked at the pile of coats on the counter. The brown corduroy jacket was lying there, its sleeves empty. I thought about Walter sewing those tags in the quiet of the basement while I was upstairs watching the evening news. He had been preparing. He knew he was losing himself, and he wanted to make sure that whatever coat he was wearing, it would always have a way to bring him home to me.

“Yes,” I whispered, my voice cracking. “Yes, I need to take them back.”

Brenda helped me pack them back into the cardboard box. She did not say anything else, and I was grateful for that. She just gave me a small, sad nod as I carried the box out to the Buick.

I drove home in silence. The heater in the Buick took a long time to warm up, and my hands were still cold on the steering wheel. When I got back to the house, I carried the box into the mudroom. I did not put the coats back on the pegs. Instead, I took them down to the basement.

I sat at his old workbench. It still smelled of oil and sawdust. On the shelf above the bench, there was a small plastic jar. I opened it. Inside were three remaining strips of the white cotton twill tape, pre-cut, with my phone number already written on them in black ink. He had kept them ready, just in case he bought another coat.

I held one of those little white strips in my hand for a long time. I thought about the sheer, quiet love it took to do something like that. To face the darkest, most terrifying thing in the world, completely alone, and spend your quiet hours stitching safety nets for your wife.