“I don’t know,” she whispered. “And I think that’s the part that hurt the most.”
I squeezed her hand tighter.
“Did you love Grandpa?” I asked softly.
“Oh yes,” she said immediately. “With all my heart.”
“But?”
“But Henry was the first.” A small, sad smile touched her lips. “The first lives in a little corner of you that never quite turns off the lights.”
Tears slipped down my cheeks before I even realized I was crying.
“I still remember our last dance,” she said quietly, tears filling her eyes now, too. “I think about it all the time.”
Something inside me broke hearing that.
I grabbed her hand carefully. “If you could… would you want to dance with him one more time?”
She looked at me silently for a long moment before nodding.
“I dreamed about it my whole life.”
By then, I was already crying.
“Grandma,” I whispered, “I’ll find him.”
She squeezed my hand weakly. “Promise?”
“I promise I’ll do everything I can.”
And that same night, after she fell asleep, I opened my laptop in the dim hospital hallway and started searching for the boy she never forgot.
I typed his name into every search bar I could find. Henry. Class of 1962.
Nothing came up at first. Just dead links and strangers with the same name.
