Here's the 800-word rewrite:
Still With You
The envelope came every year on the morning of my birthday, sliding through the mail slot like clockwork, plain cream paper with no return address and no signature. Inside was always the same three words, written in a looping cursive that looked exactly like my late husband's hand: Still with you.
For nine years, I let myself believe it was a friend's quiet kindness — someone who'd known Arthur, who'd known how the anniversary of losing him always landed on my birthday like a second wound, and who'd set up some scheduled gesture to see me through it. I never questioned it too hard. Grief makes you grateful for mysteries that feel gentle.
The tenth year, I almost didn't open it. But something made me look closer at the postmark before I set the envelope aside with the others, and this time the ink hadn't smudged the way it usually had. Under the kitchen light, I could read it clearly: Oakhaven. A town I'd never heard of, three hundred miles north, in a part of the state Arthur — a regional logistics manager who'd spent thirty years cataloguing every mile he ever drove — had told me, more than once, he'd never had reason to visit.
I sat at the kitchen table for a long time with all ten envelopes spread in front of me. Then I packed a bag and drove north.
Oakhaven turned out to be a small valley town, the kind with one main street and storefronts that still had hand-painted signs. I found the post office just before closing and put the envelopes on the counter in front of an elderly postmaster who looked at them for a long moment before he looked up at me.
"That's Arthur's hand," he said. "I'd know it anywhere. He used to bring these in himself, a whole stack at a time, years back. Paid ahead for them to go out one a year, every year, on the same date. Told me it was important." He paused. "After he passed, his nephew kept bringing them in for him. Still does, matter of fact. Comes by every spring."
I hadn't known Arthur had a nephew. I hadn't known anything, apparently.
The postmaster gave me directions to a cabin up a gravel road past the old river bridge — a property, he said, Arthur had bought fifteen years earlier and used every autumn, quiet and alone, before his heart started failing him. I drove there with my hands too tight on the wheel, half-expecting to find evidence of some second life, some other woman, some explanation that would make the last ten years of grief feel like a lie.
What I found instead was worse, in its way, and so much better.
The cabin was small and unlocked, as if it had been waiting for exactly this. The walls were covered, floor to ceiling, in framed photographs — all of them of our house, our street, our life. Photos I recognized from albums I still had at home, and others I'd never seen: me on the porch the summer we moved in, my hands full of unpacked boxes; me asleep on the couch on some ordinary Tuesday, caught mid-laugh at something off camera.
On the desk sat one more envelope, unmailed, sealed, my name written across the front. Beside it was a short letter in Arthur's handwriting, dated the year before he died.
He wrote that he'd known, near the end, that he wasn't going to get the years he'd planned for us. So he'd spent his last good autumns up here instead, writing a decade of birthday notes in advance — one for every year he thought I might need convincing that I wasn't as alone as grief would tell me I was. He'd paid a courier, a young man from town who'd later turn out to be his sister's boy, to carry them to me one at a time, long after he was gone.
I couldn't give you more years, he wrote. But I could give you ten mornings where you'd know, for certain, that I hadn't forgotten you. I hope it was enough to get you through until you didn't need it anymore.
I sat in that cabin a long time before I opened the last envelope. It held the same three words as always.
Still with you.
Only this time, I finally understood exactly how far he'd gone to make sure I believed it.