Forever borrowed

The other day I saw this cartoon on Instagram.
If you can't follow the link, this is part of it: "I borrowed your sister's book, but she left for home this morning! She won't be back for ages! I basically stole it!". "Oh, that's fine. Every book lover has at least one forever borrowed book."

Ouch. Do I really have to be reminded of that over and over again?
It's true. I have two forever borrowed books and after over 40 years I'm still feeling bad about it.

In this post, I told you about Kontakt, the German-American Friendship Club I was a member of for a few years.
Another member brought his stepson J along on some of our outings. Once he invited some of us for an evening and J showed me his books (he was such a flirt, but three years younger than me, not that you get the wrong idea here).
Two of them didn't quite seem to fit in as they looked pretty old. J pulled them off the shelf and told me he had got them from his father. Are you beginning to understand why I'm feeling bad?

Because that's when I saw they were children's books and saying that I had never read them in English - just stating a fact, honestly - prompted J to insist on lending them to me.
I should have fought harder to refuse, but I didn't.
Not because I thought I was going to keep them, but because I didn't know when we'd meet again. At that point, the club didn't meet as regularly anymore. Members had moved on to other bases or had left the Army, then we got a new club president who brought new members in, group dynamics shifted, not necessarily for the better.

As it happened, that was actually the last time J and I should ever see each other. Plans were made in the club, plans were cancelled, and the next thing I heard was that J and his family were gone.
Without the books which were still with me.
Now you may wonder why I didn't try to find out where they went. I did my best, but by then I wasn't in "Kontakt" anymore which made things harder as you couldn't just walk on the base of course. I would have had to find someone who knew J's family, but I didn't even remember his stepfather's last name if I had even ever heard it. I don't know if it would have been easier the other way round or if J even tried.

It's not as if I thought about them every second of the last 40+ years, but seeing them when I was at my children's book cabinet gave me a pang of guilt.
For years I told myself that J cherished the books because his father had given them to him, but you know something? Frankly, I don't even remember after all that time if he really said that or if I automatically implied it because that's the way I felt about gifts. And I only thought about that now that I'm writing about it.
"My father gave them to me" didn't necessarily mean that he read them to his son as a kid. It could have been just an explanation for two old books on the shelf. On the other hand, him having kept them could express his feelings for them.
Whatever the truth, I can't help it, I have them now. After overthinking this thoroughly as is my habit, I think I'll just go back to feeling guilty.

But - there's always a but - where did these books come from? Are they even the books?
Oops, more overthinking.
Actually both books seem to have come from British used bookshops or even from one shop as the handwriting in the price pretty much looks the same, not that it's not possible J's father bought them there, but at least that wouldn't make them family heirlooms.
Of course they had to get to that shop somehow. One has a name written in it (who was Ellen (I have the last name and yeah, I did a quick search)?), the other one came from a school.
Which then reminded me of the book we found in our old attic eons ago and which belonged to my elementary school library aaand which I can't remember ever checking out, so I'm just going to blame my sister for that one to keep my guilt in check.

How about you? Do you have any "forever borrowed" books? If so, how do you feel about them?