Chapter Twenty-Eight
My therapist—I’d started seeing my own, separate from Elias’s, because grief needs its own room sometimes—asked me a question in our fifth session that I hadn’t let myself ask directly.
“What would it take,” she said, “for you to actually let him back in? Not the terms. Not the schedule. What would you need to feel it, instead of managing it?”
?
I didn’t have an answer that day. I found one two weeks later, standing in the kitchen, looking at the sixth line on the fridge that he’d added without being asked.
I don’t get to decide when I’ve done enough. You do.
I realized I’d been waiting for him to prove something enormous, some single grand gesture that would balance the scale all at once.
But that isn’t how grovel works, not the real kind.
It’s Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s a photo of a sleeping baby sent without demanding a reply.
It’s a leave of absence nobody makes you announce.
?
I called him that evening.
“Come to dinner Friday,” I said. “Not supervised. Not a term. Just dinner. I want to see what we are now, not what we were.”
There was a long pause on the line.
“I’d like that,” he said, and I could hear, even through the phone, that he was being careful not to sound too hopeful, and failing.