In the middle of it all, there was still the matter of the letter. Listening for footsteps from the corridor, she opened her night table drawer and removed it from its envelope. In all these years his handwriting hadn't changed. Just seeing his script on the page set her heart to fluttering. But she wasn't sure she could handle knowing what secrets the letter would reveal. She held the folded pages to her nose, but they smelled only of paper.

Hesitant, she ran her hand over her head, forgetting what would happen, then gasped as yet another clump fell into her fingers. It disgusted her to see her body falling apart like this. She flung the hair to the floor and retched, then staggered to the bathroom and dry heaved over the toilet. Her grown daughter heard the now familiar sound and rushed to her side, ever so gently pulling back the remaining wisps of hair.

"All right now?" her daughter asked.

She nodded, splashing cool water on her face and allowed her daughter to help her back to the bed, where she discreetly tugged a blanket over the letter.

"Would you like some tea?" her daughter asked.

She nodded, then waited until her child left the room before holding the letter in her hand once more.

Dear Margueritte it began. And her eyes welled.

"What's that you're reading?" her daughter interrupted with the tea.

Startled, she shoved the pages under the blanket. "It's nothing. Some old papers. You surprised me."

"Maybe you'd like to try to eat a little something -- toast, perhaps?"

She shook her head, looked out the window.

"You'll wither away," her daughter whispered.

"There's no stopping that," Margueritte replied.

"I could make you chicken noodle soup like you used to make us when we were little and had tummy aches."

Margueritte patted her hand, noticed how warm it was compared to her own. She remembered the relief it had brought when she would make that soup for her children, just to feel as though she were doing something. "Soup might be just the thing," she said.

Her daughter smiled and rushed off to the kitchen where pots and knives on chopping boards clanged.

Margueritte didn't return to reading right away. Instead, she continued staring out the window, let her mind drift back -- not to the sands of Kaneohe, but to the night they said goodbye, the night she promised to wait for him. She could smell his cologne, recall the feel of his freshly-shaven cheeks against her face, the roughness of his starched uniform. 

And then the kiss. She'd replayed it so many times in her head she was no longer sure if it had really happened or if maybe she'd stolen it from a film she'd seen.

A lump in her throat as she remembered her wedding day to the man who'd been there as she'd wept upon hearing of the naval ship that had been lost at sea, a forty-year marriage that had resulted in four beautiful children, a marriage she couldn't bring herself to regret. And yet it had been a marriage that had never, not once, known the passion she had known in Kaneohe with a man who survived the war, but never came calling. Maybe he'd heard of her marriage, maybe not, she'd never known. And now the letter waited for her to pick it up again. Now, in the middle of the chemo and radiation and vomiting and sickness, now suddenly the answers might all be right there in those pages. Answers to questions she'd stayed up nights pondering. Did she dare to look to find out why he hadn't come for her?

She could hear her daughter talking on the phone, telling one of her siblings how their mother was deteriorating. She must think I'm asleep, Margueritte thought. And her eyes did feel heavy. It would be so easy to just drift off, to not think... but there was still the matter of the letter.