That’s what I noticed first and what I understand completely now: in eleven months of sitting with dy*ng people, Alden Voss was the only one who asked me anything.
“What did your mother do?”
“Where were you when you found out?”
“Do you still drive that stretch of highway, or do you go around?”
I go around.
I had never told anyone that, and a seventy-two-year-old man with three weeks to live pulled it out of me in a single afternoon, and I thought at the time it was because he was dy*ng and dy*ng people are direct.
It wasn’t that.
It was forty-six years of practice.
Then one afternoon, Alden reached for my hand.
“Marry me, Willa,” he whispered.
My heart started pounding.
“Alden… you’re seriously ill. We barely know each other.”
“I don’t want the state handling my final hours,” he said, touching my fingers. “My last wish is to leave this world as a husband, not as a nameless file.”
