Walt Pfeiffer is seventy-nine years old, a retired antenna design engineer with thirty-two years at Raytheon and a ham radio habit that started when he was fourteen. Call sign W1AEP. His wife June died three years ago. Pancreatic cancer. Diagnosed in April, gone by August, after forty-six years of marriage.

The radio shack sat dark for two years. He couldn't walk into the room she'd let him take over in 1994 without hearing her absence in the silence between frequencies.

One sleepless October night, he went back in. Turned on the Kenwood. Scanned the bands. And on 14.227 megahertz, he picked up a signal that shouldn't exist. Impossibly clean. No static. A woman's voice, warm and immediate, unlike anything that propagates on twenty meters at night.

Her name is Delia Marsh. Edgewood, Cranston, Rhode Island. Call sign WA1FXL. She built a Heathkit DX-60 transmitter from a kit to prove a man at a ham fest wrong when he said women lacked the patience for it. She is fifty-two years old.

She is also speaking from October 1983.

They talked every night for weeks. Two lonely people on opposite sides of a forty-two-year gap, falling into the kind of intimacy that only exists at two in the morning when no one else is listening. Walt fell in love with her voice before he understood what was happening.

Then he went to the library. Found the microfilm. Cranston Herald, page four, six column inches. "LOCAL WOMAN DIES IN HOUSE FIRE." March 1984. Faulty electrical wiring. No survivors.

Walt has five months. He knows how she dies. He knows what's wrong with her house. And he's terrified that telling her will break the only connection he has left.