I Joked, “If I Were Twenty Years Younger… I’d Marry You.”… Then She Looked Me Dead in the Eye and Said, “That Doesn’t Matter to Me.”

The morning Margaret Hale brought me that apple pie, I was a fifty-year-old widower pretending my life was already over.

I had two hundred acres of Virginia cattle land, a quiet farmhouse, a dead wife’s coffee mug still sitting in the cabinet, and a whole town waiting for me to fade into the background like old men are supposed to do.