Rosie,

This is the fortieth of these I have written, and the fortieth I will not give you. They are in the tin in the workshop, under the spare hinges, where in forty years of looking everywhere you have somehow never thought to look. I do not rightly know why I cannot hand them over. I think the words come out wrong in the air and only sit right on the page, and I would sooner you have them right one day than wrong today.

So. Forty years. The girl at the shop would not believe me when I told her, she said I must have married you straight out of the cradle, and I did not correct her, because it pleased me far too much to.

We have had our bad years, and I have written about every one of them in here over time. The one we nearly lost the house. The year after we lost Daniel, when neither of us could get his name out of our mouths and we got through it somehow by both lying there pretending to be asleep. I have not forgotten any of it. I would not want to. A long marriage is not the good years stacked up neat, it is the hard ones got through shoulder to shoulder, and ours we got through.

You still hum when you cook. You still take the larger half of the blanket and swear blind that you don't. I would not change one thing, not even that, not even close.

If you are reading this, then either I finally found my nerve, or I am gone and you have found the tin at last. If it is the second, do not be cross with me for the silence. Every last thing I could not say out loud, I did with my hands instead, for forty years. Read them all. They are all the same letter, really. They all say the one same thing.

Your husband, and glad of it every single day I did not manage to tell you,