25. What We’re Choosing
Twenty Five
What We’re Choosing
The badly-cooked dinners became a habit over the following month — not every week, never planned too far ahead, always with the unspoken understanding that either of us could simply stop showing up if it stopped feeling right.
It didn’t stop feeling right. If anything, it felt more right each time, in the specific, undramatic way that trust rebuilds — not in one grand restoration, but in a hundred small evenings where nothing went wrong, where he asked instead of assumed, where I found myself, again and again, telling him true things and watching him actually receive them instead of managing them.
We were on his terrace one evening in early winter, wrapped in coats against the cold, when he reached over and took my hand — carefully, the way you’d reach for something you weren’t sure was still yours to reach for.
“Can I ask you something honest?” I said.
“Always.”
“Do you still think about her? Vanessa. Not with longing. I mean — does she still occupy space in your head the way she used to occupy space in the office.”
He considered the question seriously, which I appreciated, rather than rushing to reassure me.
“Sometimes,” he admitted. “Not her, exactly. What she represented. I think about how easy it was to be flattered instead of known, and I think about it specifically so I don’t forget how close I came to choosing easy over real, permanently, without ever quite deciding to. ”
“That’s a good answer,” I said. “Uncomfortable. Good, though.”
“I’m trying to only give you those anymore.”
I turned my hand over in his, lacing our fingers the way I hadn’t in what felt like a lifetime, and found that the gesture didn’t feel like surrender — it felt like a choice, made with clear eyes, by a woman who’d spent a year rebuilding her sense of her own worth from the ground up and was choosing, deliberately, to bring that intact sense of self back into this particular life, rather than losing herself in it the way she once had.
“I’m not the same person who left the ring on the counter,” I said. “I need you to understand that. I’m not coming back to be who I was before this happened. I like who I’ve become too much to give her up, even for you.”
“I don’t want the old version back,” Sebastian said.
“I want to build something with the version of you sitting in front of me right now. The one with her own name on a design firm’s client list. The one who makes me ask instead of decide.
I think that version is better for both of us than the one I let disappear into the background of my own ambition. ”
I leaned in, finally, and kissed him — slowly, deliberately, the kind of kiss that carries the full weight of a year’s distance behind it — and felt him respond with a carefulness that told me he understood exactly how much was being offered, and exactly how easily it could still be lost if he stopped doing the work that had brought us here.
“Come inside,” I said, against his mouth. “It’s cold out here.”
He looked at me for a long moment, searching, making sure. “Are you sure? I don’t want you to feel like this is expected, or like you owe me anything just because we’ve had a few good months.”
“Sebastian.” I took his face in both hands. “I’ve spent a year learning to say exactly what I want and not one thing more. I want to go inside. With you. Tonight. That’s the whole sentence. There’s no hidden clause in it.”
He smiled — the real one, the one I hadn’t seen in what felt like years, unguarded and a little disbelieving at his own luck — and took my hand, and led me inside.