The Nurse She Sent

I mailed him a release form and a sentence that took me four hours to write: I am not going to wait for you to die. I was twenty-six. He was forty-two. He signed it and never wrote back, and I spent fifteen years being told I'd done the right thing by every person who knew the story except me. Now I'm the night nurse at a hospice two hours from the Hangmen's clubhouse, and Rome Devereaux is on my unit with a failing liver, a chart full of refusals, and the same hands I used to hold in a parking lot in the rain. His club needs him alive for a vote. His specialist has stopped returning calls. His daughter — mine, actually, Nora, grown — reads him the form I sent him in 2009 and asks him why he signed. He tells her the truth. I hear it from the hallway. A reunion age gap motorcycle club romance about the second half of a life and whether there's still room in it for a man you already buried.