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“Thank you,” I say to her.

“Rescue her from him.” She half-laughs. “If I had a choice between you and Percy, I know who I would choose.”

I take the compliment with a smile. “You’ve been very helpful…”

“Hope,” she fills in the blank for me. “My mom told me to always live up to my name if I could, so I hope I did that today.”

I chuckle at her play on words. “You did, Hope. Take care of yourself.”

“Take care of the woman you love.” She smiles. “Damn, she’s lucky.”

“I’m the lucky one.”

I mean it because whether or not Opal ever feels the same way about me as I do about her, I consider myself the luckiest man in the world. I got to spend time with her, and I’m a changed man because of that.

57

Opal

“I’ll see Louie again tomorrow,”Aunt Hildy tells me as we enter her brownstone. “I can’t wait.”

I can tell that’s true by the giddiness in her voice.

After Louie set Percy straight about how Hildy had created Turquoise Crown entirely on her own, he explained to his grandson that the only game he had ever helped Hildy with was Seven Rolls to Bliss. Percy demanded to know what that was, so Louie told him it was private and none of his business.

The look on Percy’s face was priceless.

He left his grandfather’s apartment at the same time as we did.

I drop my tote bag on a decorative wooden chair near her front door. “Why did you stop seeing Louie all those years ago?”

That question has been sitting on my tongue, waiting to be asked since I saw them kiss goodbye. The kiss was nothing more than a short peck on the lips, but there was tenderness in the way Louie reached up to cradle Aunt Hildy’s cheek when she leaned close to him.

“Italy,” she says, sighing heavily. “I had an internship lined up in Italy after college graduation. I didn’t want to go.”

I follow her into the kitchen. “How long were you gone for?”

She reaches up into a cabinet to grab two tall water glasses. “Long enough for Louie to think I had forgotten him.”

Judging by what I witnessed between them today, neither forgot the other.

“Life happened,” she continues to explain as she fills our glasses from a water pitcher she keeps in the fridge. “My internship became a temporary job, so we decided to pause our relationship.”

“Thank you,” I say as she hands one of the glasses to me. “Was it a mutual decision to pause things between you?”

She sips from her glass. “Louie brought it up initially. I saw it as a good idea.”

Nodding, I take another swallow of water.

“I went out to dinner with a gorgeous man in Milan.” She laughs. “Louie dated a ballerina he met when he went to a conference in Boston.”

“So you kept in touch?”

“For a time,” she murmurs. “Until we stopped. Life got busier. The letters weren’t as frequent. The calls all stopped. We drifted apart, and then Louie got married.”

I watch her face as she explains the loss of that love to me.

“He has a year left, or maybe a little more,” she explains, even though I know because I was standing next to her as Louie explained he’s battling an aggressive formof cancer. “That’s a lot of sunny afternoons to visit and share stories.”