Prompt: Conversation with my spouse Word count: 1200 Genre: Women’s fiction
He’d been 86 when he died. She was 92. A scandal it was, when they got together sixty five years ago. She was so much older than him, and already had a baby by another man. Tongues wagged, glances burned and shoulders turned against them. But it didn’t bother Arthur or Peggy. They held their heads high and over the years, turned that first heady flush of romance into a family. Stronger together than they’d been apart.
Wars came and went. Service to his country bent and bowed him, while she stayed at home raising the children they’d made together, as well as the boy that had been t’other man’s. The one whose beginning might have been a mistake, but who had been loved just as much as the others. And when the business of raising the boys was over, and work was a distant memory, they could rise late, go to bed early and spend the minutes in between in each other’s company. A small life, simply lived.