I reached in and drew it out into the daylight, and I set my chisel down against the wall real slow, because inside that oilcloth was a mans whole heart, sealed into a brick wall and waiting eighty years for somebody to find it.
It was a bundle of letters tied with a faded ribbon, a small case of war medals, and a photograph of a young man in uniform standing beside a girl with her hair pinned up, both of them laughing.
The letters told the story. A young man had lived in that house before he shipped out in the war, and before he went, he sealed his letters to his sweetheart into the wall of the home he hoped to bring her back to. He wrote that he was leaving his heart in the brick where it would be safe, and that he would come home and dig it out and marry her.
He never came home. The letters stopped in 1944, and the house passed through other hands, and his girl never knew what became of the man who promised to bring her there.
I could have left it, or handed it to the fellow who hired me and washed my hands of it. But some things a man cannot walk away from. So the homeowner and I set about finding that girl, if she was still living, and by the grace of a small town and long memories, we found her. She was in her nineties now, in a care home not two miles off, a widow twice over who had never forgotten her first love.
I put those letters in her hands. She read them, the ones she never got, the ones sealed in a wall while she waited and wondered, and she held those medals against her chest, and she wept the way a person weeps when a grief eighty years old finally finds its rest.
He had loved her to the end. He had sealed it in brick so it would outlast him, and it had, and now she knew.
He left his heart in a wall so it would be safe until he came home, and eighty years later a mason finally brought it to her. She passed a few months after that, peaceful, the letters on her nightstand and his photograph in her hand. Twenty eight years I have laid brick, and I have raked out more joints than I can number. That is the only wall I ever opened that had a love story sealed inside it, and I am grateful past words that I was the one who found it, and that I did not leave it in the dark.