He wasn’t gone.
He was just afraid in a way he didn’t know how to say.
“We were both terrified,” I said finally. “Just in completely different ways.”
He looked at me.
I sat down across from him.
Outside the sunroom glass, the garden was going golden at the edges the way new gardens do in the early evening, and neither of us said anything for a while, which was its own kind of answer.
Weeks later, we sat in the same two chairs in the warm afternoon light.
The garden was blooming. The reading nook had become my favorite place in the house.
Clara had visited twice, and both times Rowan made her coffee and asked about her other patients by name, because that is the kind of man he is, the kind of man I had somehow, in two weeks of fear and silence, almost let myself forget.
“What happens now, Ro?”
He looked around the sunroom. At the garden through the glass. At the life we had spent twenty years treating as a destination instead of a place we were already standing.
“We stop saying one day. We just start.”
He reached over and took my hand.
Outside, the garden was doing exactly what we’d always hoped it would.
Simply being there.
Real and growing and ours.
