“He didn’t walk, ma’am. He sat.”

I had to ask the man to repeat himself. I was standing in our kitchen, still in the same cardigan I’d worn to the grocery store three days in a row because getting dressed felt like too much to manage.

It had been two weeks since we buried Robert. Two weeks since I stood in the rain at Lakeview Cemetery and shook hands with people whose names I immediately forgot. And here was this man on the phone, this Gil somebody, telling me that my husband of 22 years had been sitting on a park bench every Sunday morning. Not walking. Sitting.

I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. He always came back sweaty. He brought his water bottle.”

Gil said, “I can’t speak to that, ma’am. I just know what I saw. Every Sunday, bench 14, by the big oak on the north path. Same time. 7 a.m. One hour. Then he’d leave.” There was a pause. “I wanted you to know because he was a good man. I could just tell. And I didn’t want that bench to just be… I don’t know. I wanted someone to know about it.”

I thanked him. I hung up. And then I stood at the kitchen sink for probably ten minutes just looking at the faucet.

Robert was not a mysterious person. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. He was an accountant for 31 years. He liked plain pizza and hated the smell of scented candles. He fell asleep during every movie we ever watched after 9 p.m., without exception, and he always denied it afterward. He was steady and a little boring and completely mine, or so I thought. When he was diagnosed in November, we had eight months of conversations about everything.

Or I thought we did. We talked about the will, the house, whether I should move closer to my sister in Phoenix. We talked about our daughter Mara and whether she’d be okay. We held each other in the dark and said the things you say when time is running out.

He never mentioned a William.

I drove to the park the next morning. I don’t know what I was expecting. I found the north path easy enough, and the oak tree, and bench 14. It was just a regular park bench. Green paint, slightly faded. I sat down and the wood was warm from the sun, which I wasn’t prepared for. I put my hands flat on the seat the way you do when you sit down, and something about the smoothness of it caught me. The armrests and the seat edge were worn in a way that felt different from normal foot traffic. It was worn from hands. From one specific person’s hands, resting in the same spot, week after week for years.