It was a dress, a handmade vintage dress, small, sized to fit a young child of perhaps five years old.

The stitching was exquisite, delicate and precise, executed with a level of care that spoke of enormous skill and enormous love, though the hem had frayed a little with age.

It was beautiful.

It was also, somehow, unbearably sad, in a way I could not yet name, as though the fabric itself held sorrow in its threads.

“What is this?” I whispered, my voice small in the quiet room.

And Arthur turned from the window, and I saw that his own eyes were wet, and he began, softly, to tell me the true story of the man I had married, a story that began forty-five years before, in a city I had never associated with him, with a family he had never once mentioned.