The person behind me was my father. He had followed me from the house, because he had known this day would come, and he sat down in his same chair and asked me to sit across from him the way the women did. Then he told me the truth the waitress could not. The woman with the scratched-out face was my mother’s twin sister, Coralie, who died in a car accident the night of that opening in 1990, driving home from the very restaurant, and whom my mother never spoke of again for the rest of her life. My father had loved my mother for forty years. What he had never told anyone, including me, was that before he ever met my mother, he had been engaged to Coralie first.

The envelopes were not a trick played on the women. They were letters to me. He wrote a new one before every date and taped it under the booth, then removed it the next morning, unopened, because he never went through with it. Seven times he had sat down across from a kind woman, and seven times, when she reached for the check and the evening turned real, he had frozen, apologized, paid, and gone home, because sitting in that booth, under that photograph, on the anniversary spot of the two women he had loved and lost, he could not make himself begin again. He kept choosing the one place that guaranteed he never would.

The letters, he said, were in case he died before he found the courage. He wanted me to know why he could not move on, and why he had never blamed the women who left.

I read the one with my name on it at the table. It was three pages. The last line said he was sorry he had let grief become a room he kept walking back into on purpose.

We stopped going to that restaurant. I took him somewhere new, somewhere with no photographs and no ghosts, and he met a woman named Adaeze at a garden club that spring, and last year, at seventy-two, he called her for a second date himself.

The scratched photograph is at my house now. He asked me to keep it. Both sisters are in it, and my mother, and him, all young, all before.

He spent ten years mistaking loyalty to the dead for love, and returning to the one booth that would keep him faithful to it. What he needed was not another first date. He needed one person to sit across from him and finally see the whole of what he was carrying. I did. And the day he stopped hiding it under a table was the day he was finally free to begin.