I almost left. I genuinely almost got up and went home and decided I didn’t need to look any closer. I don’t know what stopped me. Morbid curiosity, maybe. Or maybe some small part of me understood that Robert had been carrying something alone for a very long time and he had been waiting, on some level, for someone to find it.

I crouched down and looked under the seat.

The carving was small. Careful. It looked like it had been done over time, not all at once. “William Thomas Briggs. 7 months loved.” The letters were uneven but deliberate. I put my hand over my mouth and just stayed there, crouched on the path, for a minute.

Gil must have been watching from somewhere because he came over pretty quickly. He was older than I expected from his voice, maybe 65, with one of those sun-weathered faces that makes it hard to guess an age. He sat down on the bench next to the spot where I was still kind of kneeling and he didn’t say anything for a second, which I appreciated.

Then he told me what he knew.

Robert had a first wife. Her name was Sandra. They’d been together in their mid-twenties, and Sandra got pregnant, and the baby, a boy they named William, was stillborn. Seven months. Gil said Robert had told him this years ago, just once, in the kind of way people mention something enormous when they’re not quite looking at you. Sandra never recovered from it, emotionally. They separated. And then about two years after William was born and died, Sandra was killed in a car accident on Route 9.

I sat down on the bench at some point during this. I don’t remember exactly when.

Robert met me four years after Sandra died. I knew he’d been married before. He told me that.

He said it hadn’t worked out, that it was a long time ago, that she had passed away. I didn’t push. We were 34 and 36 years old and starting something new and I respected that a person’s past was their own. I thought I understood what “it didn’t work out” meant. I thought I knew the shape of his grief.

I did not know the shape of his grief.

Gil said he’d only heard what Robert said to the bench once, by accident. He was doing early maintenance on that section of the path and Robert didn’t hear him come up. He said Robert was sitting quietly, not crying, just holding the armrest, and he whispered, “Daddy’s here. Tell your mama I kept my promise.” And then he sat in silence for the rest of the hour. Gil said he backed away and let him be and never brought it up until now.

I asked Gil what he thought the promise was.

Gil shrugged. Said he didn’t know. But he said it like he had a guess he wasn’t going to share, and I respected that too.