It was solidarity. I watched you grow stronger over the years. I watched the fear leave your eyes. I was here the Tuesday you came in without your wedding ring, looking lighter than air. You saved yourself, my dear.

I just made sure you had a quiet place to figure out how to do it.

Keep reading. Yours always, Ada Rollins Tears blurred my vision so completely that the words on the page dissolved into blue smears. I sat in that modern, brightly lit library and wept for the strict, unsmiling woman who had been my silent guardian angel for thirty years.

I had spent decades thinking I had navigated the darkest chapter of my life completely alone. I thought I had tip-toed through the minefield of my twenties and thirties by sheer luck and careful planning. To realize that another woman—a stranger—had been standing in the shadows the entire time, quietly sweeping away the tripwires so I wouldn’t fall… it broke my heart, and simultaneously healed a part of it I didn’t know was still bruised.

I left the library that day and drove straight to the local florist. I bought the biggest arrangement of yellow roses they had. It took me two hours to find Ada Rollins’s headstone in the county cemetery, but I found it. She had passed away in 2021, right in the middle of the pandemic.

I laid the flowers on the grass, sat down beside her stone, and for the first time in thirty years, I finally got to say thank you.