I bent and picked it up off the bedroom floor and pulled the oilcloth back, and inside was an envelope. Yellowed, brittle at the folds, and across the front in a mans careful hand was written one word. Her name. I held it out to her and she went white, and she raised her hand slow to her mouth, because she knew that writing. It was her husband. And her husband had been gone eleven years.
She took the envelope in two shaking hands and sat down on the edge of the bed, and she asked me to stay, so I stayed. She opened it careful as a person opens something holy. Inside was a single sheet, and she read it, and the tears came down her face without a sound.
He had written it in 1961, the week they moved in, the same week he cut his hand fixing that very window. A young man, a brand new husband, had sat down and written his bride a letter and tucked it up under the windowsill of their bedroom where he knew it would not be found unless the whole window came out someday. He wrote that he did not know how many years they would get in this house, but that he meant to fill it with a good life for her. He wrote that if she was reading this it likely meant he had gone on ahead, and that she should know he had loved her from the first day in every room of this place. He signed it the way she told me he always signed things to her.
Sixty years that letter waited in the wall. He never told her. He carried the secret of it his whole life, through raising their children in those rooms and rocking babies by that window and growing old together, and he took it to his grave, a love letter sealed in the bones of the house, waiting for the day the window finally came out.
And here I was, a window man from Zanesville, the accidental hand that set it loose. She looked up at me with her face wet and said, in a voice like a girl, that he always was a romantic fool, and that she had missed him so.
He had found a way to say I love you to her one more time, sixty years after he wrote it and eleven years after he died.
I did not finish her windows that day. It did not seem right. I came back the next morning, and she had the letter propped on the mantel where she could see it, and she followed me room to room again, telling me the stories, lighter somehow, like a weight she did not know she carried had lifted clean off her.