I didn’t hear her footsteps at first.

That’s what happens when you spend four years training your mind to count minutes instead of noticing people. Minutes were safer. Minutes didn’t ask questions. Minutes didn’t tilt their head and wonder why a man with a clean haircut, a pressed shirt, and an unbroken streak of perfect quarterly reports lived like a ghost.

But I heard her voice.

“What’s stopping you from dating?”

The words struck the center of my chest, right where the breath sits before it becomes speech. I stood with my briefcase in hand, half-turned toward the aisle that led to the elevators, already tasting the cold air outside, already seeing the traffic lights that would decide whether I made it to the hospital in nineteen minutes or twenty-two.

Amelia Crawford blocked the doorway to my cubicle like she owned the building.

She did, technically.

New CEO. Six months in. Thirty-one years old, sharp-eyed, sharp-suited, sharp enough that even the office fluorescent lights seemed to behave better when she walked past. She didn’t yell. She didn’t smile. She just looked at me the way a banker looks at a balance sheet that isn’t balancing.

Her arms were crossed. Her expression was composed, but her gaze carried the impatient heat of someone used to answers.

I tightened my grip on the briefcase handle. My knuckles whitened. I hated that she could see that, too. I hated that my body reacted before my brain could dress itself in professionalism.

“I’m… not sure what you mean,” I said, because that was what men like me said when they were cornered by people like her.

Amelia’s eyebrows rose a fraction. “Everyone talks about it.”

I tried to keep my face still.

“For years,” she continued, taking a step closer, lowering her voice so the people in the next row of cubicles couldn’t feed off it like free entertainment, “and not once have you joined us for drinks after work. Not once have you mentioned a girlfriend or a date or even someone you’re interested in.”

She glanced at my empty desk: no photos, no trinkets, no coffee mug that said anything about who I was. Nothing but a monitor, a notebook, and a pen aligned like a soldier at inspection.

“What are you hiding?”

I should have laughed. I should have made a joke, tossed something light into the air so it could float between us and keep her from reaching the truth. That’s what I did with everyone else. A polite deflection, a practiced pivot back to work, a smooth escape.

But exhaustion had a way of thinning the walls you built to survive.

I turned slowly to face her fully. Her perfume was subtle, expensive, clean. She looked like someone who belonged in boardrooms and airport lounges and glossy articles about “young disruptors.” She looked like someone who had never had to live her life in increments of fifteen minutes.

And for the first time since she’d arrived, I let her see that there was something behind my careful blankness.

“You really want to know?” I asked.

My voice came out quieter than I intended. Not weak. Just… worn.

Amelia’s expression shifted, almost imperceptibly. She had expected irritation. Maybe embarrassment. Maybe a flirtatious excuse. Instead, she got the truth hovering at the edge of my lips like a storm cloud.

She held my gaze, then nodded once.

“Meet me in my office in ten minutes,” she said. “And don’t leave yet.”

Her heels clicked away, crisp and final, and I stood there feeling the weight settle in my stomach as if someone had dropped a stone into a glass of water.

This conversation was coming whether I wanted it or not.

I had avoided it for four years. Apparently my time was up.

Six months earlier, Amelia Crawford had walked into Sterling Financial Group as our new CEO, and the building had responded the way water responds when you drop a blade into it: everything split, rearranged, and found new edges.

People whispered. They always do.

Too young.
Family connections.
Old money.
Probably a puppet.
Probably a shark.

I didn’t add my voice to the chorus. I didn’t care how she got the job. I only cared that she didn’t make my job harder.

I kept my head down. I worked. I hit my numbers. I left at the same time every day, as if the clock were a contract.

But Amelia wasn’t the type to let people hide behind good performance.

During her first week, she pulled every performance report from the last five years. Studied them like they were holy text. I knew because my desk sat close enough to her office that I could hear the cadence of her phone calls, her questions slicing clean through the air.

“Why is this team’s productivity high but retention low?”
“Why do these clients request the same analyst repeatedly?”
“Who keeps declining leadership roles?”

That last one landed on my name like a spotlight.

My file was clean. Maybe too clean.

Four years of perfect reviews. Never late. Never absent. No mistakes. Clients liked me because I listened. Because I remembered the details. Because I didn’t sell them fantasies. I sold them plans that could survive reality.

And three times, Sterling had offered me promotions.

Team lead. Senior manager track. Bigger office. Bigger salary. Bigger respect.

Three times, I said no.

Two weeks after Amelia started, she called me into her office.

I arrived at exactly 3:00 p.m., not early, not late, because punctuality is what you cling to when everything else in your life is uncertainty.

She sat behind her desk with my file open, pages flagged with sticky notes like evidence.

“I’ve been reviewing your record,” she said, her voice neutral. “You’re one of our strongest performers. Why have you turned down every leadership opportunity we’ve offered you?”

I had prepared for that question the way you prepare for bad weather: you build your shelter long before the clouds arrive.

“I prefer to leave at 5:30,” I said. “The team lead position requires longer hours. I’m not interested in staying late.”

Amelia leaned forward, confusion tightening her features. “Most people would do anything for these opportunities. Why don’t you want to advance? Don’t you want more out of your career?”

I held my posture steady, my tone polite. “Not everyone wants to climb the ladder, Miss Crawford.”

She watched me like she could see the hinge of the lie. “Then what do you want?”

Some of us have already found what we’re looking for.

I didn’t say that. Not then.

I said, “I’m satisfied where I am.”

It was true in the way half-truths are true: accurate on the surface, strategically incomplete.

She dismissed me with a wave, but I could feel her eyes on me for the rest of the day, as if she’d found a pattern and couldn’t stop tracing it.

That evening, like every evening, I packed up at 5:25.

I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t linger. I didn’t let anyone catch their hook in my sleeve with a casual, “Hey, you wanna grab a drink?”

I walked out, got into my car, and drove away.

I had somewhere to be.

I couldn’t be late.

The drive from Sterling Financial to Riverside Memorial Hospital took twenty minutes if I caught the lights right.

I knew every light by personality.

The one that changed too quickly, like it was impatient with you.
The one that lingered on red, like it wanted you to think about what you’d done wrong.
The one that turned green at the last second, like a small mercy granted by a universe that rarely bothered.

I pulled into visitor parking at 5:45, as I always did, and walked through the entrance.

The security guard nodded at me without asking for ID.

The nurses on the third floor smiled.

After four years, I had become part of the building’s rhythm. A regular sound in the hallway. A familiar shape in doorways.

Room 312 sat at the end of the east corridor where the afternoon sun filtered in and softened the harshness of white walls.

I pushed open the door and stepped inside, and everything in me unclenched.

There she was.

Grace.

My wife.

The woman I married seven years ago. The woman who had been lying in this bed for four.

She looked peaceful, like she was sleeping off a long day and would wake any moment with a groggy smile. Her chest rose and fell in steady partnership with the ventilator. Her hair had grown longer since the accident, and I had learned how to brush it the way she liked: gentle, patient, the bristles never yanking.

Nurses offered to do it. I always said no.

This was mine.

I pulled the chair close to her bed and sat, taking her hand in mine. Warm skin. Soft fingers. The quiet miracle of contact.

“Hey, sweetheart,” I said, and my voice softened without permission. “Long day.”

I told her about the office like she was listening, because I needed to believe she was.

“We’ve got a new CEO. Her name’s Amelia. She asks questions like she’s trying to solve the world. Today she asked why I don’t want to advance.”

I laughed softly, but it sounded hollow in the quiet room.

“I didn’t know how to tell her I already have the most important job.”

I squeezed Grace’s hand, careful. “Taking care of you is my job.”

From my bag, I pulled the book.

A romance novel Grace had bought at the airport four years and three months ago, right before everything collapsed. She’d been so excited about it, talking about the characters like they were friends, teasing me for pretending not to care.

We’d made it through a few chapters before the accident.

I had kept reading anyway.

Every single day for four years, I read out loud.

I never skipped ahead. I never rushed. I wanted her to come back to the same story she left, as if finishing it together could stitch something back into place.

“Chapter twenty-seven,” I said, opening to the page I’d marked last night.

And I began to read.

Back at Sterling, Amelia was still thinking about me.

I didn’t know that then. I only learned later, when the truth finally spilled out and there was no point pretending we hadn’t become tangled in each other’s lives.

She told me my words from that first office conversation haunted her.

Some of us have already found what we’re looking for.

What did that mean?

Where did I go every night?

Why was leaving at 5:30 so important I would turn down promotions most people dreamed of?

She started watching.

Not in a romantic way. Not at first. More like a detective who can’t stand an unsolved puzzle.

She noticed I ate lunch at my desk.

She noticed I didn’t gossip.

She noticed my desk was blank of personal life, like I’d erased myself on purpose.

I had.

Because two lives were easier to manage when they didn’t touch.

Sterling was the life where I was competent and composed and predictable.

Riverside was the life where I was raw and faithful and terrified, and still showed up anyway.

The crack in my wall came a month later, on a Thursday, in the parking lot.

I was walking to my car at 5:30 when my phone rang and I saw Riverside Memorial on the screen.

My heart jumped, because hospital numbers only call you when something changes, and change is a threat when the only thing keeping you upright is routine.

“Hello?” I answered quickly.

“Mr. Patterson,” Nurse Linda said, calm and familiar, “everything’s fine. Don’t worry. I just wanted to update you on Grace’s day.”

I exhaled so hard it hurt.

“Okay. Thank you. How was she today?”

“Very peaceful. We adjusted her position this morning and she seemed comfortable. Physical therapy worked with her limbs. Everything went smoothly.”

“Did she seem comfortable?” I asked, the same question I asked every time, because I needed someone to tell me she wasn’t suffering in silence.

“Yes,” Linda said gently. “She seemed comfortable.”

“Good,” I whispered. “Tell her I’m on my way. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

I ended the call and stood there for a moment with my hand still around the phone, letting relief wash through me like warm water.

And when I looked up, Amelia Crawford stood three rows over with her keys in her hand, frozen.

Her face wasn’t sharp then. It was startled. Human.

She had heard everything.

She had heard the fear.

She had heard the tenderness.

She had heard me say “her.”

The next morning, Amelia did something she later admitted she wasn’t proud of.

She went to HR.

She asked for my emergency contact information.

“Just making sure our records are updated,” she told them, steady voice, steady posture, CEO authority making lies unnecessary because no one would question her anyway.

The file came back.

One contact.

Riverside Memorial Hospital, long-term care wing.

No parent.

No sibling.

No friend.

Just a hospital.

She stared at that line for a long time, then closed the file like it might burn her.

At lunch, she stayed in her office and typed Riverside Memorial Long-Term Care into a search bar.

She read about brain injuries, comas, persistent vegetative states. She read family testimonials that sounded like prayers written in the language of exhaustion.

When hope needs time, we’re here.

She shut the laptop and sat very still.

She understood then that my life had a center she couldn’t see.

And because Amelia Crawford was not built to leave a door unopened, she decided to go look.

She scheduled a tour.

Official excuse: Sterling’s foundation grants. Evaluating healthcare charities.

Real reason: she needed to see what kind of “someone” could pull a man like me out of this building at 5:25 every day like a tether.

Wednesday arrived gray and cold.

She dressed like a CEO, not like a woman about to walk into someone else’s devotion and feel smaller.

Dr. Patricia Coleman, the director, greeted her with kind eyes and a calm voice, leading her through hallways that didn’t feel sterile, just quietly brave. Plants by windows. Soft lighting. A garden where grief could sit down without being judged.

“Our residents are here because someone refused to give up on them,” Dr. Coleman said as they walked. “Every person in this building has at least one person who believes they’re worth fighting for.”

Amelia’s throat tightened.

They turned down the east corridor.

And then, through the window of Room 312, Amelia saw me.

Not the office version of me with my shoulders squared and my expression blank.

The real me.

Sitting beside a bed. Holding a woman’s hand. Turning pages of a paperback like it was holy.

My lips moved as I read aloud.

Amelia stopped walking as if the floor had decided to catch her.

“That’s Grace Patterson,” Dr. Coleman said softly, following her gaze. “Traumatic brain injury from a car accident four years ago. Drunk driver ran a red light. She was twenty-eight.”

Twenty-eight.

Amelia’s fingers curled at her sides.

“Her husband comes every day,” Dr. Coleman continued. “Every single day. Rain, snow, holidays. Doesn’t matter. He’s never missed once. Not in four years.”

Husband.

The word hit Amelia like cold water.

So the quiet man at Sterling wasn’t hiding a girlfriend.

He was keeping a marriage alive with nothing but presence.

“Some families struggle to visit once a month,” Dr. Coleman said, voice threaded with admiration. “But that man reads to her for an hour every evening. Brushes her hair. Brings flowers every week. Yellow roses. He says they’re her favorite.”

Amelia watched me turn a page.

She watched my face soften.

“Does she respond?” Amelia heard herself ask.

Dr. Coleman shook her head. “Not yet. Doctors don’t expect she ever will. Damage was severe. But her husband refuses to accept that.”

“How does he… keep coming back?” Amelia whispered.

Dr. Coleman smiled sadly. “Who says there’s no hope? Maybe hope looks different than we think. Maybe hope is showing up day after day, whether anyone’s watching or not.”

Amelia walked the rest of the tour like a woman underwater.

When it ended, she thanked Dr. Coleman, promised to consider Riverside, and made it to her car before the sobs broke loose.

She cried for Grace.

She cried for me.

And she cried for herself, because she realized success had taught her how to win, but not how to stay.

Not how to keep a promise when it stopped paying you back.

She returned to the office and tried to work, but her mind kept sliding back to Room 312 like a needle pulled by a magnet.

At 5:00, she stood at her window.

At 5:25, she watched me walk to my car with purpose.

At 5:26, my car left the parking lot.

She watched until I disappeared, then sat down and made a decision that felt like the first honest act of her adult life.

She called Dr. Coleman and arranged an anonymous donation to cover Grace’s care.

Five years.

Room 312.

“Can you keep it completely private?” Amelia asked.

“Of course,” Dr. Coleman said. “We respect donor privacy.”

Amelia hung up and stared at her hands as if they belonged to a different person.

It wouldn’t wake Grace.

It wouldn’t erase the accident.

But it would lighten a burden I had been carrying silently, one bill at a time.

And for Amelia, that mattered.

She didn’t do it to be thanked.

She did it because, for once, she wanted her life to stand for something other than climbing.

Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, everything changed.

I was at my desk, finishing a report, when my phone rang.

Riverside Memorial.

My blood turned to ice.

“Mr. Patterson,” Director Morrison said, and the way his voice sounded told me the universe had shifted, “I’m calling with some news about your wife.”

I couldn’t breathe. My hand squeezed the phone so hard pain sparked down my wrist.

“She showed signs of responsiveness this morning,” he said. “Purposeful movement. She squeezed the nurse’s hand when asked.”

For a second, the office blurred.

The walls. The cubicles. The fluorescent lights. All of it fell away, and I was standing at the edge of four years of silence, staring into a crack of sound.

“Are you certain?” I croaked.

“Yes,” he said, and I heard cautious joy there. “Her neurologist would like you to come in as soon as possible.”

My body moved before my mind could catch up.

I grabbed my jacket, my keys, my briefcase forgotten on the desk like it belonged to another man. People looked up as I rushed past.

Amelia’s office door was open.

She looked up, saw my face, and something in her expression softened in a way I had never seen before.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I stopped, just long enough for my voice to find itself.

“Grace,” I said. “They think… she responded.”

Amelia’s hand flew to her mouth.

Then she nodded once, firm and gentle. “Go.”

Not a command.

A blessing.

“Whatever it is,” she said softly, “go.”

I drove faster than I should have, hands shaking on the steering wheel, the red lights suddenly personal insults. I ran through the hospital like a man chasing a miracle before it changed its mind.

Room 312.

A neurologist waited outside, eyes bright with guarded hope.

“We want to try something,” she said. “We want you to talk to her. Read like you usually do. Let’s see if she responds again.”

I walked into the room and my chest tightened.

Grace lay there the way she always had, but the air felt different, charged, as if the room itself knew something was possible again.

I took her hand.

“Hey, sweetheart,” I whispered. “I’m here. I’m always here.”

My throat tried to close around the words. I forced them out anyway.

I picked up the book. We were near the end now. Only a few chapters left. It felt like superstition, like finishing it might open a door.

I read.

Five minutes.

Ten.

Nothing.

My heart began to sink, old familiar grief reaching for me like a tide.

Then, faint as a bird’s heartbeat, I felt it.

A twitch.

Not random.

A squeeze.

I stopped reading so fast the pages fluttered.

“Grace,” I breathed. “Can you hear me?”

I leaned closer, forehead almost touching hers.

“Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

Another squeeze.

Stronger.

Deliberate.

The sound that came out of me wasn’t a sob or a laugh. It was something older than both. Something like a soul remembering it’s allowed to hope.

“That’s it,” I whispered through tears. “That’s my girl. I’m here. I’ve been here the whole time.”

Doctors flooded in. Tests. Lights. Gentle voices trying not to frighten a miracle back into hiding.

An hour later, the neurologist sat with me in the hall.

“Her brain activity has increased,” she said. “Not dramatically, but measurably. Something is waking up. We don’t know how far recovery will go. It may plateau. It may grow. But this… this is something.”

Something.

After four years of nothing, something was everything.

I took two weeks off work.

Amelia didn’t hesitate. “Take whatever you need,” she said. “Your job will be here.”

In those two weeks, I barely left the hospital.

I read constantly.

I talked about everything: the weather, the book, memories of our wedding, the way Grace used to steal fries off my plate and then act offended when I called her out.

I told her, “You missed nothing,” and “You missed everything,” and somehow both were true.

Grace began to respond in small ways that made the staff smile like proud parents.

A finger twitch.

An eyelid flutter.

Then one morning, her eyes opened for a few seconds.

They weren’t focused, not fully. They didn’t recognize me yet. But they looked at the world again.

I sat there trembling, whispering, “Welcome back,” like the words could be a bridge.

When I returned to work, I still left at 5:30, but the leaving felt different.

It wasn’t only devotion pulling me forward anymore.

It was hope, bright and terrifying.

Amelia noticed immediately.

We were reviewing reports when she said, softly, “Something changed.”

I looked up, and for once I didn’t pretend.

“Grace responded,” I said. “She squeezed my hand. Then her eyes opened.”

Amelia’s eyes filled. “Oh my god.”

“It’s slow,” I added, voice shaking. “It could stop. But… it happened.”

“I’m so happy for you,” she said, and I believed her.

But behind her happiness, I saw something else too. A quiet sadness, like she had found something beautiful and realized how empty her own hands were.

“Thank you,” I said, because gratitude sat in my chest like a stone that needed to be lifted. “For understanding. For… protecting my time.”

Amelia’s mouth pressed into a small smile. “That’s what friends do.”

Friends.

The word landed between us like a line drawn in chalk. Necessary. Clear. Not entirely true, but true enough to keep us from stepping into danger.

Because there had been something growing there, small and tender. Not a betrayal. Not an affair. Something quieter: respect turning into care, care turning into the kind of attachment you’re ashamed to admit when your life is already full of obligation.

Grace’s hand squeeze had changed everything.

It made hope possible, but it also made my heart complicated in a way I didn’t have words for.

Grace’s recovery was slow, then steadier, like a sunrise that takes its time but never stops climbing.

She moved to rehabilitation.

She relearned how to walk, how to coordinate her hands, how to hold a cup without shaking. Her memories returned like scattered pages, out of order, some missing entirely, but enough to rebuild a story.

One evening, six months after the first squeeze, she spoke in full sentences.

Her voice was hoarse, careful, like it had to remember itself.

She looked at me for a long time, eyes clearer now, and said, “There’s someone else.”

My stomach dropped.

“You have someone who helped you,” she continued, watching my face. “I can see it. You look… softer. Like someone reminded you you’re still alive.”

I tried to deny it out of reflex, out of guilt, out of old habits. Grace squeezed my hand, not weak anymore.

“Don’t lie to me,” she said gently. “Tell me.”

So I did.

“My boss,” I admitted. “Amelia. She… saw what I was doing. She understood. She protected my schedule. She helped.”

Grace’s mouth curved into the faintest smile.

“I want to meet her,” she said. “When I can hold a real conversation. I want to thank her.”

Then she added, surprising me with the steadiness of her gaze, “I’m not jealous.”

“Grace…”

“You kept your promise,” she said, voice soft but firm. “You never gave up on me. But I was gone for four years. You needed someone. I’m grateful she was there.”

The words left me wrecked in a new way. Not with grief. With love so big it made my chest ache.

A year after that first squeeze, Grace came home.

She still had therapy. Still tired easily. Still had days where her memories slipped like soap. But she was home. Awake. Real.

And one night, over dinner, she said, “Invite Amelia.”

I hesitated. “That might be… awkward.”

Grace lifted an eyebrow, the old Grace shining through. “Then we’ll be brave.”

So I invited Amelia to dinner.

She tried to decline. “You don’t have to do that.”

“It’s Grace’s request,” I said.

That did it. Amelia couldn’t say no to Grace.

When she arrived, she looked like the CEO again: composed, polished, carrying a bottle of wine like a shield.

Grace met her at the door with a smile that held no suspicion, only gratitude.

Dinner was cautious at first. Three people circling an invisible truth, careful not to step on it.

Then Grace, because she has always been braver than me, set down her fork and looked at Amelia directly.

“Thank you,” she said. “For seeing him. For protecting his time. For understanding what most people couldn’t.”

Amelia’s eyes filled immediately. She blinked fast, trying to keep the tears from falling.

“He made it easy,” Amelia whispered. “The way he loves you… it changed how I see everything.”

Grace reached across the table and took Amelia’s hand.

“Love isn’t finite,” Grace said. “It doesn’t run out just because it’s shared. You helped my husband survive the hardest years of his life.”

She squeezed Amelia’s fingers gently.

“That means you’re family now,” Grace added, “whether you like it or not.”

Amelia laughed through tears, and the sound cracked something open in the room.

Not romance.

Not yet.

Just truth, warm and strange and real.

That dinner became monthly dinners, then coffee, then a friendship between Grace and Amelia that surprised all of us.

They talked about books and ambition and fear.

Grace told stories from before the accident, and Amelia listened like she was learning a language she’d never been taught: the language of staying.

Amelia visited occasionally, never uninvited, always respectful, always careful. And I watched the two women I loved in different ways build something that looked like peace.

Still, there was an edge under it all.

I felt it in the quiet moments when Amelia’s eyes lingered on me too long.

I felt it in the way Grace watched us sometimes, thoughtful, not suspicious, just… aware.

Two years passed.

Grace grew stronger. Her laughter returned fully. Her mind sharpened. She regained herself not as the woman she had been exactly, but as someone forged by fire and still bright.

One evening, she sat us both down like a judge calling court.

“You two love each other,” she said simply.

Amelia froze. “Grace, I would never…”

Grace held up a hand. “I’m not accusing. I’m naming.”

I swallowed hard. “Grace…”

“You kept your promise,” she said to me, eyes steady. “You loved me when I couldn’t give anything back. You held my life up with your bare hands.”

Then she looked at Amelia.

“And you learned how to care because you watched him. You became gentler because you saw what devotion looks like.”

Amelia’s voice broke. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t,” Grace said. “Not if we do this honestly. Not if we choose each other on purpose.”

She leaned back, exhaling like she’d been carrying this thought for a long time.

“Love expands,” she said. “It doesn’t divide.”

Silence filled the room, thick and trembling.

I felt fear rise up, because unconventional love comes with sharp edges: judgment, misunderstanding, the world’s easy cruelty.

But there was Grace, alive, eyes clear, offering us a map out of the maze.

“Slow,” I said, because I needed anchors. “Careful.”

Grace smiled. “Always.”

Amelia nodded, tears falling now without shame. “I don’t know how to do this,” she admitted.

Grace reached for her hand. “Then we learn.”

It didn’t become a fairytale overnight.

It became a practice.

Conversations, sometimes hard. Boundaries, always respected. Space for fear. Space for grief. Space for joy without guilt.

We didn’t erase the past.

We built on it.

Grace and I kept rebuilding our marriage, not as a relic of who we used to be, but as something living. Amelia didn’t replace anything. She didn’t compete. She joined, gently, when invited, learning the rhythm of a family that had survived disaster and refused to let love be another casualty.

Two years after Grace came home, Amelia moved in.

Not as a scandal.

As a choice.

As commitment.

As someone who finally understood that success felt hollow when you had no one to come home to.

Years later, at a small gathering of friends who knew our story and chose kindness over curiosity, Amelia leaned close to me and whispered, “I never thought I’d find people who understood that some promises don’t have expiration dates.”

I squeezed her hand.

Across the room, Grace caught my eye and smiled, the kind of smile that had carried me through fluorescent hallways and long quiet chapters.

“I didn’t think so either,” I admitted.

And in that moment, I understood something I wish I’d known earlier: love isn’t only the lightning strike people write poems about.

Sometimes love is a man showing up at 5:45 p.m. every day for four years.

Sometimes love is a woman learning to stay.

Sometimes love is a wife waking up and choosing generosity instead of fear.

Sometimes love is the courage to make a family out of what life tried to break.

And somehow, impossibly, it worked.

Not because it was easy.

Because we kept our promises.

Together.

THE END