He knew he had to do something about it.

Crossing to the antique brass umbrella stand by the back door, he removed the wooden walking cane and stepped out onto the small concrete porch behind the house. He took a moment to steady himself, leaning absently on the cane as he gazed across the well-kept yard, where dusk-driven shadows gathered in the silence. With a sharpened gaze he studied the white clapboard house next door.

It stood dark and empty. She was gone, he knew. Earlier in the day he’d watched through the front window as she drove away in her old green sedan. She wore the blue patterned frock he liked so much, one of her prettiest. He could still remember the first time he saw her in it.

She had looked like an angel to him then, her skin pale and clear and almost luminescent, like fine porcelain, her gray eyes giving him that no-nonsense look of hers when he’d gallantly reached out to take her hand. She had hesitated, then acquiesced after a few moments with a gentle tsk, tsk of her tongue. She was like that, always keeping everything proper. He could still remember the feel of her hand in his — light and cool to the touch, dry yet soft. He had fallen in love with her all over again.

Yet she had not returned his love, not that day, not ever. Their brief affair so many years ago still shone brightly in his memory. He’d been married in those long-ago days, but told her he’d seek a divorce if only she’d have him. She refused — then and in all the years since.

Life whirled them away from one another, and for decades he watched from afar as she married and lived a life he so desperately wanted to share with her. Only when his own dear Emily passed away nine years ago, a victim of cancer, had he gathered the gumption to buy this house he lived in now, next door to hers.

He’d been uncertain of her reaction to this bold maneuver, but she seemed genuinely glad to reconnect with an old friend, and they began to reestablish their relationship, becoming good next-door neighbors, if nothing else at first. In the years since then she had warmed to him, her own husband dead and buried these past twelve years. It was just the two of them now, living alone in their old homes.