I only wanted somewhere to sit until the dizziness passed, with my blind Chihuahua curled beside me.

Instead, a simple cup of coffee turned into one of the most humiliating encounters I’d had in years.

Then a stranger stepped forward and asked the café owner one question.

“Christopher, does the name Victoria mean anything to you?”

The man’s face lost all its color.

And suddenly, everything changed.

Twenty minutes earlier, Christopher hadn’t cared who I was.

That was the part I would remember most.

My name is Carol.

I’m seventy-four years old, recently widowed, and careful with every dollar because Social Security doesn’t leave much room for mistakes.

That afternoon would have been my forty-seventh wedding anniversary.

My husband, Frank, had been gone for eighteen months.

I still visited the cemetery regularly.

That afternoon, I brought flowers.

Benny, my fourteen-year-old Chihuahua, stood beside my shoe while I arranged them near Frank’s headstone.