The Sunday Letter · November 8, 2026
You Will Meet a Woman in Paris
I was standing at my kitchen sink, up to my elbows in dishwater, when I heard it.
You will meet a woman in Paris.
It was January of 2015. My father had passed a few months earlier, and my marriage had ended around the same time. I was not looking for anyone. I was looking for a clean plate. The strange part was the voice itself. It sounded like my dad, a man who spent his whole life telling me what would make me happy. Apparently dying had not slowed him down one bit.
“Mind your own business,” I told him, and went back to the dishes.
Two nights before I left on a three-week tour to entertain our troops overseas, a blonde woman in four-inch heels stepped onto the red carpet in our theater lobby for a photo. She had me by about four inches, so she politely crouched down. “You don’t have to bend down,” I told her. “You may be taller in those heels, but my personality is six foot five.”
She laughed, the camera flashed, and she was gone. The whole thing took ninety seconds.
What I didn’t know was that this woman had a system. When a man asked for her number, she gave him one that was a few digits off. That night, across town, her sister asked her a question that changed both our lives: “Your real number?”
What came next involved a plane that turned around over the Atlantic, twenty-two soldiers in a rec hall built for 150, a First Sergeant whose name really was George W. Bush Jr., and a knock on a hotel door in Paris that I still can’t tell without grinning.
David
P.S. Have you ever heard a whisper you almost ignored? Hit reply and tell me about it. I read every one.
This Week on YouTube
Every story has a secret, and the secret is always the Why. A free lesson from my storytelling course, Stand Up! And Speak.
A Line to Carry
A new quote every morning on Instagram. Save this one, or send it to someone who needs it today.
Photo of the Week
Eternal Sunset
I stood behind them on the deck and I did not say anything because there was nothing to say that the sky was not already saying. She stood in the middle in her white jacket and her long dark skirt, in her socks on the warm boards, and her hair was down her back the way I like it. The boys were on either side of her. The tall one stood with his hands at his sides the way a man stands when he is becoming a man and does not know it yet. The other sat on the edge of the boards with his legs out, easy, the way a young man sits when he trusts the world. The big tree was black against the sky and every branch was clean and fine, and behind it the sun was going down orange and then red and then a color I do not have a word for. An old man in Costa Rica told me once that the sun never really sets. He said it only goes on to someone else. Somewhere it is always going down on someone, he said, and so the sunset never ends. It only travels. I did not believe him then. I believed him now.
I love you, I thought. I love the backs of your heads, and the warm boards, and the grass going blue in the shadow, and the first cool coming up out of the ground. A man spends his life looking for the true thing and he goes far to find it. Then one evening it is standing in front of him in its socks with its children on either side, and the sun is putting gold on all of them, and he understands that the sunset he is watching is the same one. It is the same one that went down on his father, and on the people who stood on this hill before there was a deck or a fence, and the same one that will go down on these young men when they are old and standing behind someone they love. It does not end. It goes around and around the world like a ring, and we step into it for a little while, and then we step out, and the light goes on to the next ones. The color went out of the sky slowly, the way the good things go. Then she turned and looked back at me and smiled, and I knew that somewhere it was still going down, and that we were still in it, and that we always would be.
—David Ahearn
