Nora Bell said yes before I finished making the joke.

Nora Bell said yes before I finished making the joke.

“Why would you say the left side?”

“You’re right-handed. Most people turn left at the top of a ladder.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

She stepped past me into the bedroom and began unpacking.

I should have pressed her.

Instead, I returned to the truck and brought in the pieces of the second chair.

Nora crouched on the porch and ran one finger along the curve of a rocker.

“For guests?” she asked.

“For guests.”

“Do you get many?”

“I’m about to have one.”

Her hand rested on the bare maple.

“Nobody spends this much time building something for just anybody, Ben.”

Cold air tightened around us.

I picked up the wood before my face could admit anything.

That evening, I made chili. Nora washed the dishes. Snow fell beyond the windows, covering our tire tracks until the road disappeared.

She sat near the stove with her wool socks propped on the hearth.

“When do you have to leave the duplex?” I asked.

“December first.”

“And if I hadn’t made the joke?”

“I would’ve figured something out.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m thirty-four. People my age are expected to say that instead of ‘I’m scared.’”

She turned her mug between her palms.

“You could’ve told me.”

“You would’ve offered me your spare room.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I didn’t want to become a problem you solved.”

“You’re not a problem.”

“No?” Her eyes lifted to mine. “Then what am I?”

Again, the honest answer rose.

Again, I strangled it before it escaped.

“My neighbor.”

She nodded as if I had confirmed something disappointing but unsurprising.

“Good night, neighbor.”

Her bedroom door closed. The latch clicked, small and final.

I climbed to the loft, struck my head on the left beam, and lay awake listening to the stove tick.

The truth came sometime after midnight.

I had started the second chair the week Nora waved at me from her window with a blue pencil while I stood in my garage holding a sanding block.

It had never been for guests.

There had only ever been one.

In the morning, a clear whistle woke me.

The new red kettle sang from the stove. Nora poured coffee into a black mug and handed it to me.

There was cinnamon floating on top.

I stared at it. “How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“I put cinnamon in my coffee.”

“Lucky guess.”

“Nobody guesses cinnamon.”

“You’d be surprised what people notice when you think they aren’t looking.”

Before I could ask what else she had noticed, she sat at the table and opened her sketchbook.

“I got a job,” she said.

“A book?”

“A permanent position. Staff illustrator for a small educational publisher in Minneapolis. Salary, health insurance, an actual desk that doesn’t double as a kitchen table.”

“That’s great.”

“I signed a lease.”

The happiness I felt for her collided with something selfish.

“When?”

“It begins March first.”

“And until then?”

“I had options.”

I glanced toward the bedroom. “Apparently you chose the wilderness package.”

“Apparently.”

“I’ll drive you down February twenty-eighth. Eight in the morning. That’ll give us time to unload before dark.”

“You don’t have to.”

“It’s on my way.”

“Minneapolis is not on the way from Little Pine to Duluth.”

“It’s on the way back from somewhere.”

Her laugh filled the cabin, but I looked at the old calendar still hanging beside the stove.

March first.

To Nora, it was a beginning.

To me, it already sounded like goodbye.

By the second week of December, the lake had frozen white.

Walt Mercer—not a relative, though every stranger assumed otherwise—drilled a test hole before allowing us beyond the shore.

“Six inches,” he said. “Enough for two people if one of them quits eating Ben’s chili.”

Nora looked at me. “We’re in danger.”

I taught her to ice fish with two buckets, a short rod, and more confidence than experience. She held the rod like a paintbrush and jerked the lure as if punishing it.

“Smaller,” I said. “Like a heartbeat.”

I moved behind her and placed my gloved hands over hers.

“Lift. Wait. Then let it settle.”

She became very still.

Her back rested lightly against my chest. Her breath formed small white clouds beside my cheek.

“Like this?” she asked.

“Exactly.”

Neither of us was looking at the fishing hole.

The rod bent.

Nora shouted and pulled up a perch scarcely longer than her hand. She insisted we release it because, in her words, it looked deeply concerned.

In the evenings, I assembled the second chair at my grandfather’s table. Nora sat opposite me and drew while the woodstove glowed.

Sometimes she drew the chair.

Sometimes I looked up quickly and found her drawing my hands.

She told me she had three books due before spring. Twice a week, we drove to Walt’s store so she could send files over his internet connection.

The store was little more than canned food, bait, gasoline, and rumors. Walt enjoyed a new story more than a profitable sale, and Nora and I were the only new story on the lake.

“So,” he asked one afternoon, loudly enough for six men near the coffee machine to hear, “how’s the joke?”

“Holding up,” Nora said.

Then she slipped her arm through mine.

My body forgot how to move.

She counted out her half of the grocery money on the counter as if daring anyone to interpret the gesture. I carried the bags to the truck with her arm still linked through mine and kept silent for fear that words might frighten it away.

On Christmas morning, I gave her a pencil box made from the chair’s maple offcuts. The lid slid into a hidden groove. Inside, I had carved a tiny fox because foxes appeared in almost every book she illustrated.

Nora ran her thumb over the carving.

“No one has made me anything since I was nine,” she said.

“What happened when you were nine?”

“My father promised me a dollhouse.”

I waited.

“He never built it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I stopped wanting one.”

Her voice said the opposite.

She gave me a drawing wrapped in plain brown paper.

It showed our street during a power outage two winters earlier. Every house was dark except mine. An oil lantern hung beside my front door, casting a warm circle onto the snow.

A solitary man stood in that circle, holding a thermos.

“That’s me,” I said.

“Yes.”

“From the ice storm.”

“Yes.”

I remembered that night.

The power had failed across the neighborhood. I had crossed the driveway and asked Nora to sit beside my woodstove because her electric heat was dead. There had been no joke in the invitation.

She had said no.

Politely, but quickly.

I had stood on her step too long, embarrassed, explaining the cabin and Little Pine Lake and my grandfather’s strange kettle. Then I went home, hung the lantern outside in case she changed her mind, and never asked her directly for anything again.

Jokes became safer.

A joke always left a door open for the person telling it.

“This is beautiful,” I said.

“I date every drawing on the back.”

I placed it on the shelf above the stove, face outward.

I never turned it over.

The first Sunday in January, Nora climbed onto the signal rock to check her messages. Snow made the top slick. She handed me her phone while adjusting her boot.

The screen illuminated in my hand.

Several messages arrived at once.

One preview appeared beneath a name I recognized as her friend Emily.

The room is still yours until March if this cabin experiment gets weird. You never even came to see it.

I gave the phone back immediately.

“I saw the message.”

Nora read it without pretending not to understand.

“You had somewhere to stay,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

“Since before you invited me.”

The wind moved through the pines.

“So you weren’t facing homelessness.”

“I was facing choices.”

“You told me you had nowhere.”

“No. You decided I had nowhere.”

I climbed down from the rock.

“Why come here if you had a warm room in Minneapolis?”

She tucked the phone into her coat. “Maybe I wanted to see if the rock was real.”

“Nora.”

“Maybe I wanted four months before beginning a job that scares me.”

“You could’ve had that in the city.”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you come with me?”

Her eyes shone in the reflected snow, but her smile was gone.

“You offered me something I had stopped expecting.”

“What?”

She jumped down, landing close enough that her sleeve brushed mine.

“Ask me without hiding inside a joke, and perhaps I’ll answer.”

She walked back toward the cabin.

I remained beside the rock until my feet went numb.

The blizzard arrived ten days later.

By four in the afternoon, snow traveled sideways. Wind shook the windows in their frames, and the electricity failed with a dull click. The well pump stopped, so we filled pots with snow and set them on the stove.

At seven, smoke began leaking from the pipe joint.

“The chimney cap is clogging,” I said.

“You’re not going onto the roof.”

“If the chimney stops drawing, we lose the stove.”

“We have blankets.”

“It’ll be below zero by midnight.”

I tied a rope around my waist and handed Nora the other end.

“If I slip, brace against the porch post.”

“This is insane.”

“This is winter.”

“No, winter is snow. This is male stupidity with weather.”

But she tied the rope around the post and held it with both hands.

Ice struck my face as I climbed. The wind tried to peel me from the ladder. I cleared the cap with a steel rod, and the chimney coughed a tower of sparks into the dark.

On the way down, my boot missed a rung.

I dropped six feet before the rope snapped tight.

Nora screamed my name.

My shoulder struck the cabin wall. Pain flashed down my arm, but the rope held. Nora had wrapped it around her waist and thrown herself backward into the snow.

When I reached the ground, she slapped me across the chest.

“Don’t ever do that again!”

“We needed the stove.”

“I need you alive!”

The words stopped both of us.

Snow collected in her hair and eyelashes. She was breathing hard, one hand still fisted in my coat.

I covered her hand with mine.

“Nora—”

She released me and turned toward the door.

“Your shoulder’s bleeding.”

Inside, she cut away my torn shirt and cleaned the wound. It was shallow, but her fingers trembled against my skin.

“I’m all right,” I said.

“You don’t get to decide whether I was frightened.”

“I wasn’t trying to.”

“You always make everything small enough to laugh at.”

Her voice broke.

I had no joke for that.

We slept downstairs because the loft was too cold. I sat on one end of the couch near the stove. Nora sat at the other until the wind forced the room’s remaining warmth into a narrow circle.

“You can move closer,” I said.

“Is that a joke?”

“No.”

She slid beside me.

Our shoulders touched.

Hours later, her head came down against me slowly, the way a decision comes down after exhausting every other possibility. I kept my hands on my knees. I wanted to put an arm around her, but I had spent three years asking sideways.

This line belonged to her.

Her breathing deepened.

When I woke before dawn, my neck ached and my grandmother’s quilt covered both of us.

I had not put it there.

Nora was already awake, feeding wood into the stove.

“You talk in your sleep,” she said.

“I do not.”

“You do.”

“What did I say?”

She latched the stove door. “‘Not a joke.’ Twice.”

“Anything else?”

“Something about the beam being a vicious little bastard.”

“The beam knows what it did.”

She smiled, but she didn’t tell me what had come before the words not a joke.

Something remained shifted after the storm.

She sat beside me on the couch even when the far end was equally warm. When we walked, her hand occasionally brushed mine and stayed there for three or four steps.

But February approached.

So did March first.

One clear night, the temperature dropped so low that the snow squeaked beneath our boots. We walked onto the frozen lake after supper.

Above us, the sky opened into more stars than darkness. Then a pale green light appeared over the northern trees, trembling like a curtain breathing in an unseen window.

Nora stopped.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“The northern lights.”

“They’re beautiful.”

“They don’t usually perform on request.”

“So they’re like you.”

“I’m extremely reliable.”

“You’re reliable about everything except the one thing that matters.”

Before I could ask what she meant, she found my hand.

Even through two layers of wool, I felt every finger.

We stood beneath the green light, our breaths meeting in a single cloud.

I leaned toward her.

She leaned too.

Then her free hand rose and rested flat against my chest.

It was not a push.

It was a locked door.

“Not while it’s still a joke,” she whispered.

“It stopped being one.”

“When?”

I opened my mouth.

No answer came quickly enough.

“That’s what I thought,” she said.

“Nora, I don’t know how to do this.”

“Yes, you do. You just don’t know how to do it without protecting yourself.”

She looked down at our joined hands.

“My father made every promise as a joke. He promised the county fair, a puppy, my school plays. When he didn’t appear, he’d smile and say he had only been teasing. If I cried, I was too sensitive. If I became angry, I couldn’t take a joke.”

Her fingers tightened around mine.

“He never had to break a promise because he never admitted making one.”

“I’m not your father.”

“No. You show up. That’s why this is worse.”

The green light moved above her face.

“Two winters ago, you asked me directly,” she said. “I said no. Since then, everything important has come wrapped in a joke.”

“I didn’t want to hear no again.”

“And I didn’t want to spend my life being asked questions that weren’t real.”

She released my hand.

“I can wait,” I said.

“For what?”

“Until you’re ready.”

A sad smile touched her mouth.

“That’s another way of putting the choice entirely on me.”

She walked back toward shore.

I followed several paces behind, finally understanding that patience could become another hiding place.

Twelve days before Nora’s departure, Walt held his annual fish fry.

Folding tables filled the store. Paper boats overflowed with fried walleye, and the coffee urn looked large enough to heat a church. Everyone who wintered on Little Pine appeared, hungry for food and gossip.

Nora sat beside me. Beneath the table, her knee rested against mine.

Walt stopped with a tray of coffee.

“Last fish fry before our artist leaves for Minneapolis.” His eyes moved between us. “So, Ben, is it still a joke?”

The room went quiet.

Forks paused.

I had an easy line prepared.

Funniest joke I ever told.

It would have earned a laugh. It would have protected Nora, protected me, and kept every dangerous thing behind my teeth.

I looked at her.

“No,” I said.

The room became even quieter.

“It stopped being a joke before we reached the cabin. If I’m honest, it stopped being one before I invited her.”

Someone near the bait counter whistled.

Nora’s knee left mine.

She placed her fork on the table, rose, and walked out without her coat.

I took it from the hook and followed.

She stood beside my truck with her arms wrapped around herself.

I held the coat open. She stepped into it but did not turn around.

“I said it,” I told her.

“To a room.”

“What?”

“You told Walt, six fishermen, two widows, and a coffee urn.”

“They asked.”

“I asked first.”

The words struck harder than the cabin wall.

“I asked you on the lake, Ben. I asked when it stopped being a joke. You couldn’t answer me. But a room full of people gives you an audience, and suddenly you’re brave.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“No, it isn’t.”

She turned then, tears bright in her eyes.

“I didn’t want a public declaration. I wanted one honest sentence when nobody was watching.”

“I’m trying.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you angry?”

“Because trying doesn’t erase the consequence.”

I opened the truck and started the engine. Warm air gradually filled the cab.

Nora sat on the passenger side with her hands beneath her thighs.

During the eleven-mile drive home, her hand lay on the bench seat between us once. Palm down. Not reaching. Not withdrawing.

I almost covered it.

Almost was the story of us.

I kept both hands on the wheel.

The following week passed politely.

Politeness is a terrible thing between two people who have nearly kissed.

Nora packed her drawing supplies. I oiled the finished chair and set it on the porch beside my grandfather’s. There was a hand’s width between them.

On February twenty-seventh, her duffel bags stood beside the door.

We had agreed to leave at eight the next morning.

That night, she handed me a flat envelope.

“What is it?”

“Something I should’ve given you earlier.”

I set it on the table.

“Aren’t you going to open it?”

“If it’s meant to make tomorrow easier, I don’t want it.”

Her face tightened.

“Not everything is about making things easier for you.”

She went into the bedroom and shut the door.

I stared at the envelope for an hour.

Then I climbed to the loft and lay awake while the cabin settled around us.

At six forty the next morning, I climbed down.

Her bags remained by the door.

Her coat was gone.

Through the front window, dawn spread gray and pink over the lake. Nora sat on the porch in the new rocking chair with two mugs beside her.

I stepped outside in my socks.

“You’re in my chair,” I said.

“You said it was for guests.”

“That was a lie.”

“I know.”

She pushed one mug toward the other chair. Black coffee. Cinnamon.

I sat.

For a while, we watched mist rise from the ice.

“Ask me,” she said.

My heart began striking my ribs.

“Stay.”

“Stay where?”

“At the cabin.”

“For how long?”

“The rest of winter.”

“Winter ends tomorrow.”

“Then come home to Duluth with me.”

“That isn’t a complete question.”

I gripped the mug.

All the jokes assembled automatically—small escape routes disguised as charm. I let each one die.

“Don’t move to Minneapolis,” I said. “Stay with me.”

Nora closed her eyes.

When she opened them, there were tears on her lashes.

“No.”

One word.

Clean and devastating.

I stared across the frozen lake.

“All right.”

“That’s all you’re going to say?”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“The truth would be a change.”

Anger rose because anger was easier than humiliation.

“The truth is that I built that chair for you. The truth is that I haven’t brought anyone here since my grandfather died. The truth is that every morning, I wake up before you and wait for the kettle because hearing you downstairs makes this place feel alive.”

My voice roughened.

“The truth is I love you, Nora. I have probably loved you since the night you said no to me on your porch. And tomorrow I’m supposed to help carry your life into an apartment three hours away.”

She cried silently.

“But I won’t ask twice,” I said. “Your no gets to mean no.”

“That,” she whispered, “is the first promise you’ve made me.”

I looked at her.

“I’m still leaving.”

“I heard you.”

“I worked ten years for a staff position. Freelancing nearly broke me. I counted grocery money. I skipped dental appointments. I smiled when people called my work a hobby.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. Because I hid it well.”

She wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand.

“If I give up that job to stay here, one day I might blame you. Or worse, I might blame myself and punish you for it. Love shouldn’t require one person to become smaller so the other doesn’t feel lonely.”

The words hurt because they were true.

“So this is it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You said no.”

“To abandoning my life. Not to you.”

The cold seemed to pause around us.

Nora looked toward the window.

“Open the envelope.”

I went inside and retrieved it from the table.

The drawing she had given me at Christmas—the dark street, my lantern, the man holding the thermos—still rested above the stove. On impulse, I lifted it and turned it over.

The date written on the back was December fourteenth.

Two years earlier.

The exact night I had asked her to sit by my stove.

She had drawn it that same night.

I returned to the porch and opened the envelope.

Inside were twenty-three drawings.

Me shoveling our shared driveway.

Me sanding a board in my garage.

Me leaving a bag of salt beside Mrs. Dahl’s steps.

Me asleep in a lawn chair after a fourteen-hour shift.

My truck beneath the first snow.

The oil lantern beside my door.

The final drawing showed the cabin porch with two empty chairs pushed together.

Every page was dated.

The earliest was three years old.

“You knew about the kettle,” I said.

“You told me that night during the outage.”

“And the beam?”

“You described hitting it every winter.”

“The date I leave?”

“I watched for it.”

“Little Pine?”

“You talked about the lake for eleven minutes because you were nervous.”

I lowered the drawings.

“You remembered all of that?”

“I remember everything from that night.”

“Then why did you say no?”

She stared into her coffee.

“My father left when I was twelve. My mother spent the next fifteen years turning every new man into an emergency exit. I promised myself I would never need someone so badly that losing him could destroy the room I was standing in.”

“Nora—”

“When you knocked with that thermos, I had already been watching for your truck every afternoon. I knew the sound of your garage door. I knew you put cinnamon in your coffee because I saw you sprinkle it through your kitchen window.”

Her laugh broke in the middle.

“You invited me across the driveway, and I wanted to say yes so much that it frightened me. So I said no.”

“And I never asked again.”

“Not directly.”

“I thought I was respecting your answer.”

“You were. At first.” She looked at the second chair. “Then you started using jokes to make sure I could never answer another real question.”

I sat back.

“Why did you come to the cabin?”

“Because Emily’s room was safe. Minneapolis was sensible. But when you joked about the winter, you looked at the tarp covering that chair.”

“You saw it?”

“Your garage door was open in October. I saw you shaping the arm. I told myself it belonged to someone else.”

“It didn’t.”

“I know that now.”

She pulled her chair across the boards until its runner struck mine. The sound was small, but it seemed to travel through every year I had spent alone.

“I came because I needed to know whether you had built a place for me or merely happened to have extra room.”

“And?”

“You built a place.”

Her hand settled on the armrest between us.

“But a place isn’t the same as a cage, Ben. If you love me, let me go to Minneapolis.”

Every frightened part of me wanted to bargain. I could offer her my spare room, a studio, money, transportation—solutions built like walls around the possibility of losing her.

Instead, I asked, “Can I visit?”

“Yes.”

“Can I call you tonight after I drive home?”

“Yes.”

“Can I tell you I love you when no one else is listening?”

Her fingers curled around mine.

“Yes.”

“Can I kiss you?”

That wide smile arrived through her tears.

“Yes.”

I kissed her at seven fifteen in the morning, forty-five minutes before I was supposed to drive her away.

She tasted like cinnamon and cold air.

The red kettle whistled inside, clear and perfectly on the note.

Neither of us moved.

At eight, we loaded her bags.

At one thirty, I carried them into her Minneapolis apartment. It was on the third floor of a brick building overlooking a narrow alley. The radiators clanged, the kitchen tiles were cracked, and the bedroom window faced a wall.

She loved it.

I helped assemble her drawing desk near the only good light. Then I stood by the door with my coat in my hands.

“I could stay tonight,” I said.

“You could.”

“But?”

“But you’d stay because leaving hurts. I need you to leave and still come back.”

That was harder than climbing a frozen roof.

I kissed her forehead.

“I’ll call when I reach Duluth.”

“Not as a joke?”

“Not as a joke.”

The first months were not romantic in the way stories promise.

I drove to Minneapolis twice in March and once in April. A spring storm canceled another visit. Nora missed two of my calls while working late, and I spent a whole night convincing myself that silence meant regret.

In May, she accused me of withdrawing whenever I was afraid.

She was right.

In June, I accused her of treating every disagreement like proof that depending on someone was dangerous.

I was right too.

We did not solve each other.

We learned how to apologize without erasing what happened.

“I was scared” replaced “I was only kidding.”

“I need time” replaced a slammed door.

“I’m angry” became safer than “I’m fine.”

Mrs. Dahl watered Nora’s neglected plants and reported my movements with criminal efficiency. Walt asked about her every time I entered his store and pretended not to notice when I bought cinnamon.

Nora’s new job was demanding. Her editor changed entire books after she had finished the illustrations. Her health insurance finally paid for the dental work she had postponed for four years.

I was proud of her.

I was also lonely.

Both things could be true.

In August, she received credit on the cover of a book for the first time. At the launch, I stood in the back while she signed copies for children. A little girl hugged the book to her chest and told Nora she wanted to draw when she grew up.

On the drive home, Nora cried.

“If I had stayed at the cabin,” she said, “I would’ve missed this.”

“I know.”

“Does that hurt?”

“Yes.”

She took my hand across the truck’s bench seat.

“Thank you for not asking me to miss it.”

Love, I learned, was not proven by convincing someone to remain.

Sometimes it was proven by driving them toward the life they had chosen, then trusting that choice could still include you.

The following November, frost silvered the shared driveway again.

I lowered the truck’s tailgate. Two rocking chairs stood strapped side by side beneath a blue tarp.

Nora’s Duluth duplex remained empty. She had renewed her Minneapolis lease. We still had three cities’ worth of road between our ordinary lives.

Mrs. Dahl watched openly from her window now. She had abandoned all pretense of curtains.

Nora pulled up at seven in a dusty blue car. She climbed out with two duffel bags, her drawing case, and the red kettle.

“You’re late,” I said.

“It’s seven-oh-three.”

“Winter starts at seven.”

“Then winter needs to become more flexible.”

I took one duffel. She took the other.

At the passenger door, I stopped.

There were still questions I could ask sideways. There were still ways to disguise hope as humor.

I chose none of them.

“Nora Bell, would you like to spend this winter with me at Little Pine?”

She studied my face.

“Until February twenty-eighth,” she said. “Then I go back to my job.”

“I know.”

“I’ll need the whole table.”

“I built you another one.”

“My name stays on my lease.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to give it up.”

“And if we fight?”

“We tell the truth before it turns into silence.”

She set down her bag.

“And after winter?”

“We choose again.”

Her eyes filled, but she smiled.

“Okay.”

This time she said it slowly.

This time I knew exactly what she meant.

Mrs. Dahl opened her window and shouted, “For heaven’s sake, kiss her before the coffee gets cold!”

Nora laughed into my coat as I pulled her close.

Our ending was not perfect.

She still feared promises. I still used silence when words made me feel exposed. We would spend months apart, miss calls, argue over roads and schedules, and sometimes wonder whether love ought to be easier.

But easy had never been the same thing as honest.

I had spent years believing that asking for what I wanted gave another person the power to wound me. Nora had spent years believing that saying yes meant surrendering her way out.

That winter, we learned something quieter.

A real invitation does not hide the cost.

A real answer is allowed to contain boundaries.

And love—when it is worthy of the name—does not say, Stay so I will never be lonely.

It says, Choose freely, and I will keep choosing too.

I secured the two chairs in the truck while Nora climbed into the cab. She placed the red kettle between her boots.

As we pulled away, Mrs. Dahl raised her mug from the window.

Three hours later, the cabin emerged from the trees. Snow rested on the roof, and Little Pine stretched beyond it, dark and waiting for ice.

Nora stepped onto the porch.

The two chairs faced the lake with their runners touching.

She put her hand into mine.

“Home?” I asked.

“For the winter,” she said.

It was not forever.

It was not a joke.

It was enough because we had both chosen it.

THE END.