PART 1
I thought that at 80, life held no more surprises for me. But when I finally found the woman I had loved and lost 60 years earlier, she revealed a secret that shattered everything I thought I knew about my past.
I celebrated my 80th birthday alone at my kitchen table, with a small cake and a candle that I had almost forgotten to light.
My wife had died 23 years earlier, and we had never had children.
Despite that, I had always dreamed of having one.
For 23 long years, the house had seemed strangely silent to me.
Each room was filled with memories, but none of them spoke back to me.
One evening, while leafing through an old box of photos, I came across a picture of the girl I had loved for years, from high school to university.
Her name was Evelyn.
She was smiling by a lake, her hair blowing in the wind, one hand gripping her skirt as if she were holding back a laugh.
I remembered that laugh so clearly that it hurt.
We were young, stubborn, and convinced that life would wait for us.
But, following a painful misunderstanding, we separated and never saw each other again.
PART 2
