Chapter 4 #3
"Don't thank me yet. Thank me when the paperwork's actually done.
Right now I'm mostly just annoyed at how much of it there is.
" But she was smiling when she said it, and I understood, watching her, that underneath the brisk efficiency she was doing this with her whole heart, the way she did everything for this family.
Slowly, over those first weeks, we found something like a rhythm.
Not a resumption — I want to be clear about that, because it would have been easy, tempting even, to try to simply pick back up where the two years cut us off, to pretend the gap could be stitched closed and ignored. We didn't do that. We started again.
Real dates, awkward and careful, the two of us learning each other's new edges.
I took her to the diner and discovered she'd become a person who ordered her coffee differently now, black instead of with cream, a small change that told me something about a woman who'd learned to want less sweetness in her life and make do.
She took me on a walk through the community garden and showed me the plot she'd started tending in the second year, when the grief got too big for the house and she needed somewhere to put her hands.
I understood, looking at the neat rows she'd planted, that grief and growth had lived in the same soil for her the whole time I was gone.
The old house sat empty through all of it, shuttered, waiting. Neither of us mentioned going back. It sat between us like a held breath, a room in the conversation we both knew was coming and weren't ready to walk into yet.
Some evenings we just sat. Her porch, mostly, mugs cooling, talking until midnight about nothing in particular and everything that mattered — who we'd each become, what the last two years had cost and taught, what we were both, cautiously, starting to hope for.
I didn't touch her, most of those nights, beyond the small permitted things — a hand near hers on the porch rail, a shoulder brushing hers when we sat close.
I was learning, the hard way, patiently, that love wasn't a thing you got to reclaim by force of feeling alone.
It was a thing you had to rebuild, plank by careful plank, and rushing it would only prove I hadn't learned anything at all.
"You're different," Josie said one of those nights, studying me in the porch light. "Quieter. Harder, in some places. Softer in others, weirdly. It's strange watching you be careful. You used to just charge at things."
"Two years teaches you patience," I said. "Or it breaks you. I decided I'd rather be patient."
"Good choice," she said, and reached over, finally, and laced her fingers through mine on the porch rail, small and deliberate and the first time she'd initiated any of it since the night I came back.
I looked down at our joined hands like they might disappear if I looked too hard.
"I'm not making any promises tonight," she said, quiet. "I want to be clear about that. I'm not ready for promises. But I wanted you to know I'm still here. On this porch. Choosing to be here."
"That's enough," I said, and meant it more than I'd meant almost anything in my life. "That's more than enough, Josie. I'll take every night you choose to be here for as long as you keep choosing it."
We sat a while longer in the quiet, her hand still laced through mine, the mountains going from purple to black as the last light finally gave out.
Somewhere below us in the valley a dog barked twice and went quiet.
A truck passed on the main road, headlights sweeping briefly across the yard.
Ordinary sounds, small-town sounds, the kind I used to take entirely for granted and now catalogued the way another man might catalogue treasure.
"Can I ask you something," Josie said, after a while, "and you answer honestly, even if the answer is complicated?"
"Always."
"Do you regret it? The choice. Staying silent, letting me grieve you, all of it. If you could go back to that moment on the table, knowing everything it would cost — would you choose differently?"
I turned the question over carefully, because she deserved more than a reflexive no.
"I regret what it cost you," I said finally.
"I regret every single day of your grief, every ounce of it, with my whole chest. But the choice itself — no.
I'd make it again. Every single time, given those exact two doors, I'd walk through the one that kept you alive, even knowing what it would do to both of us.
I think that's just going to have to be a true thing that also hurts.
I don't think it stops being right just because it was expensive. "
She was quiet a long moment, turning that over the way I'd turned over her question. "I think I can live with that answer," she said finally. "I don't love it. But I think I can live with it."
"That's all I'm asking for," I said. "Not for you to love it. Just to be able to live inside it with me."
Somewhere down the mountain, the old house sat dark and waiting, and I thought, watching her profile in the porch light, that we'd get there. Not yet. But we'd get there, one chosen night at a time.