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When we were 19, my best friend and I promised that if we were both single at 60, we'd find each other — I turned 60 last Tuesday, and my old landline rang.

Jeffrey and I became best friends at seventeen.

Not boyfriend and girlfriend. Just Jeffrey and Ruth.

He dated other girls. I went to prom with someone else. Everyone said we'd eventually realize we belonged together, but we laughed. Losing the friendship felt scarier than risking it for feelings neither of us understood yet.

One summer night at nineteen, after two terrible dates, we sat beneath the football bleachers.

"If we're both single at sixty," Jeffrey said, holding out his pinky, "we stop being idiots and find each other."

Two months later, he left for college three states away.

At first we wrote constantly. Then less often.

By the time I understood I'd loved him all along, Jeffrey was telling me about a girl he'd met at school.

In the summer of 1986, one final letter arrived.

At the bottom, he asked me not to contact him again.

I cried for weeks, then respected his choice.

I never married. Whenever people asked why, I said I simply never met the right man.

That night, the old landline in my childhood home rang. Almost nobody called it anymore, so I nearly ignored it.

"My name is Peter. I'm Jeffrey's son."

"My father wants to speak with you. He… doesn't have much time."

Then a voice I hadn't heard in forty-one years whispered:

"Ruthie, I need you to know something before I die."

"I was in love with you when we made that promise."

"And I'd already bought the ring."

"The one I was going to give you before I left for college."

"Then why did you marry someone else?"

"That's what I've spent forty years wishing I could explain."

"Please come to the hospital. There's one thing you need to see. Once you do, you'll understand why I walked away."

Forty minutes later, I pushed open his hospital-room door.

Jeffrey was lying in bed, thinner than the boy I remembered but unmistakably him.

But it wasn't Jeffrey who made me gasp.

It was what was waiting on the chair beside his bed. See less