I turned the key in the lock of unit 214 and rolled up the door, dreading what waited, and the light fell on a row of boxes on a long table, forty-four of them, each one numbered and beautifully wrapped, and a rocking chair beside them, and a note propped where I would see it first.
The note was in my husbands hand. It said: Ruthie, one box for every year we had. Open one on each anniversary after I am gone. I could not stand the thought of you facing those days alone.
My husband had made me an anniversary present for every single year of our marriage, forty-four boxes, one to be opened on each anniversary after his death, so that even gone, he would have a gift waiting for me every year for the rest of my life.
I opened the first one, the one marked for this year, our first apart. Inside was a small framed photo of us on our wedding day, and a letter, and a little bottle of the perfume I wore when we met, which they had stopped making decades ago and which he had somehow hunted down.
His letter said: Happy anniversary, my love. I know this one is the hardest. I am sorry I could not be there to hand you this myself. But I am with you. I will be with you every anniversary, one box at a time, for forty-four more years if you make it that far, and knowing you, you will. I love you today as much as I did the day I married you. More.
Forty-four boxes. Forty-four years of anniversaries, planned and wrapped and waiting, so I would never face our day alone.
The almost always he came with. Our granddaughter, it turned out, had helped him wrap and choose, sworn to the sweetest secret of her life. That was the almost, a girl helping her grandpa love her grandma into the future.
I sat in that rocking chair, which I understood now he had put there for me, and I held the first gift and wept and laughed and felt, for the first time since he passed, not entirely alone.
I brought the boxes home. They sit in my closet, forty-three of them still wrapped, one opened each year on our day. I do not know if I will live to open them all. But I know that for every anniversary I have left, my husband will be there, with a gift and a letter and his love, exactly as he promised.
The storage unit held no betrayal. It held forty-four years of a mans devotion, reaching forward past his own death to hold my hand on every anniversary to come. Sixty-seven dollars a month, so I would never celebrate our day without him. I never will. He saw to that, the way he saw to everything, narrating our love right into forever.