Grace patted my hand. “He talked about you constantly,” she said. “And the girls.” She smiled. “He said you’d make a fuss over the roses if you ever found out.” I laughed and it came out as something closer to a sob. I’d done worse than make a fuss. I’d driven over here ready to hate a 89-year-old woman who saved my whole life and never asked for a thing.

I stayed almost two hours. She told me stories about Jim at six years old, gap in his teeth, hiding books under his desk so nobody could ask him to read aloud. Stories I never got from him. I was getting my husband handed back to me in pieces by a stranger, and every piece was better than the man I thought I’d already known all of.

Before I left, Donna from the flower shop had told me one more thing on the phone, and it was sitting in me the whole drive home. The last bouquet is scheduled for next month. Then the prepaid account runs out. She’d paused. “Unless somebody wants to keep it going. The woman in Room 14 is the reason your husband became the man who could finally tell you he loved you. She’s your daughters’ real grandmother, in every way that counts.” Jim’s own mother passed before the girls were born. Grace is the closest thing they’ve got, and they don’t even know she exists yet.

I haven’t told Katie and Lauren yet. I keep picking up the phone and putting it down. I don’t know how you tell your grown daughters that their dad couldn’t read, that the bedtime stories they remember almost didn’t happen, that there’s a woman across town who made all of it possible and she’s running out of time. I will. I just haven’t found the words. Which, I know. I know how that sounds, coming from his wife.

I called the flower shop this morning before I sat down to write any of this. I gave them my card number. I told Donna to keep the roses going every month for as long as Grace is here, and then I started crying so hard I couldn’t finish the address she already had on file. The order’s in my name now. Same flowers. Same card. I’m going to keep sending the message he wrote, because I can’t think of a single word better than his.

From the boy who couldn’t read.

I just wish he’d let me know him while I still had him.