“It has been quite some time.”
“Hasn’t it?” My lips stuck together in the cold.
"How have you been?"
I crossed my legs against the frost, warming the crystals to a small pool that dampened my woolen tights. The bloom had long passed now, the sparkle of fresh snowfall diminished with street salt, the color of mud. I dipped my toe into the slush.
“I get along. I hope you’ve been doing the same?”
He stood before me as a reminder of what I’m missing, a leather briefcase in hand. The briefcase was well worn, well used, tired, long in need of stitching up.  It was a cheap investment in a marriage, yet still the kind of thing that a journalist's stipend didn't afford. A gift. One that I’d bought him nearly forty years prior. Forty years when the mud thawed. A chill slipped under the hem of my tartan, my feet drew circles back in the salt under the bench.
“I suppose.” My small mouth felt dry, lips a chapped and peeling. “I’ve been busy writing a book.”
The words slipped like his smile when I presented the gift, as valuable as a losing lottery ticket. The book had existed as emotional scrawlings in a diary for forty something years before I set about transcribing my experiences; the last secret of our marriage. All mine.
Everything that I had ever felt for this man, the archive of desperate attempts to hold onto the good times, all bundled up in my collection of pages. An index of the nights I stayed up, head pounding, hands clenched around thin air for want of him to lie beside me once more. A chronicle of the regrets I’ve had since and the regrets I never had once; everything we put in for a decade, wasting our time to fix something neither truly had a heart in. I had been working on a draft of a novel featuring everything hidden in the recess of my heart and to prove I’m truly okay, I had told him about it. One more instance of an attempt to hold onto something nonexistent to add to a generous supply. Not to say that we hadn’t been happy with each other, but there would be no more first-hand accounts to add to that archive.
"Very fitting. The Amazing Adventures of Connie. Perhaps something else. I’m glad you’ve pursued the passion, love." John’s voice faltered and he looked away, clearing his throat to regain composure. Eyes once more on mine, he smiled. Despite the strides I’d made, he seemed better off than myself. I clenched my knees together, unable to think that he got away with happiness.
“Send a letter when it’s published.” he crossed his ankles.
A laugh filled my chest, comfort dusting itself against my collar bones, my knuckles, knocking at my knees. The red door and floral paper of an entryway clouded my mind, our home swimming in my memory. Dread and discomfort slipped through the mail slot delivering the beginning of our whirlwind affair as husband and wife. From my perch on the bench I could see it laid out at my feet as a flowery doormat announcing welcome home as dinner sat on the table until the gravy developed a skin. Forty years later it was clear how inauspicious the widowed physics professor was for the women’s columnist. Despite the inadequacies, there was an inexplicable urge that gave me the impression I’d rather fall into his arms than greet my daughter as she steps off the train with her children. Despite his daughter arriving to greet the only family she’s known since early adolescence, he’d not come to the station for her.
"Please, John." He’d begun to tread the waters and received an icy answer from the woman who so icily betrayed him. I caught a glimpse of his face in my memory as our child took her first steps, of my best friend picked her up in his arms, John watching with jealousy as my fingers wound themselves between another’s. How had I ever wondered how we'd end up? We earned the silence and miscommunication. By the time we met on the platform we ought to have understood the strange pain that lingered, yet he miraculously smiled through the dull pain that I could see lying heavily across his chest. I felt at a disadvantage. The game of cat and mouse should have ended with the marriage,  No I had been so damn happy before, but if you looked at me, huddling before him, it seemed I never experienced any of it. I'd grown away from it. It had become difficult to passively watch things change.
"I’m sorry," a sheepish smile crossed my face and soon I could not wipe away the giggling notion that we could be us again. "The book is about us. The first few years, a few afterwards."
Taking a moment to dislodge discomfort and surprise from his throat, he shifted from foot to foot, blending shoe prints together in the snow. 
“Do you still have the letters? They actually might help -”
"I’d think it’d be fitting to cut to the ending, don’t you? Unhappy endings don't need justification."
He’d lost his first love to disease and myself to mutual failure. The other of our lovers left long ago, and from then on, it seemed that we’d guarded ourselves. Bundled before me he appeared colder in his age, and I was bound to grow stale at some point.
I ground my teeth together, the anger submissive as I remembered my place amidst a slow stream of city goers arriving on the platform. Biting my lip, I folded a hand over the other and squeezed them tight, effectively impeding any impulse I had to repair and replace.
“It wasn’t always unhappy.” My fingers twisted against eachother, right thumb and forefinger grasping the base of the left ring finger with disdain.
“I kept a suitcase.”
“Don’t you believe a reader deserves to fall in love once or twice?"
We stood together for a moment, taking in the creases around the other’s eyes, the patterns on the tie, on the scarf, on the stockings. For a moment, I thought I saw pity in his eyes, maybe regret. He turned to check the timetable.
“I was happy, you know.”
Though he faced away from me, I could see the smile take over his body. He turned in a circle, shoulders back as he strolled. I could see him in Hyde Park, 1951, kicking leaves off the path and swinging our hands between us. The puddles that soaked my shoes and stockings didn’t matter then. But there were no leaves, the slush gave way to his step as he returned to stand in his old footprints.
“So was I.”
A rumbling began deep below my feet, those around us moving from the station's shelter to settle at the platform's edge. At the train's signal, my ex-husband turned toward the noise ready to move as the others had. There were new tears threatening the creases of my brown eyes, blood  pounding against my skin. I was in need of aspirin. He turned back to me, the smile wiped from his features.
“The train.”
“I know.”
The groan of breaks began as the locomotive made its way towards the platform. I stood uneasily. The man who lingered so preciously before me already departed towards the edge, the train squealed and stopped dead at his feet. A young woman abandoned by her war-bound husband peered out the window at the scene, feeling the loss and recognition lingering between us. There are sudden, forlorn tears in her eyes too, caught by no gaze but mine as I make my way through the slush to greet her. I can feel the wool of her school uniform in my gloves, against the silk summer dress in early May, the collar of which had been permanently stained as he gathered his bags and left. My ex-husband once again failed to notice the young woman and her family step off the train as he brushed past them to board.
“Mom,” she arrived by my side as she had returning from school with an A in mathematics. Her thin fingers found my waist, then my shoulders, as she held herself tight. With her face pressed against my curls we stood, bound together. The children at her side cried out for the cold, tugging on her blue pantsuit, discontent and unaware. Over the platform and across the aisle I caught his eyes as he removed his overcoat and wool scarf.
It was all too late, the effort had already been wasted. Still, I caught his eyes trained on me as the whistle blows and the wheels began to churn. I stood there watching until he was long gone.