“Ro…”
He lifted his eyes to mine. “I couldn’t stand the thought of you coming home and running out of time before any of it was finished,” he said. “We’ve been saying ‘one day’ for twenty years, Bev. I kept thinking What if this is it? What if there is no one day?”
—
I stood in the sunroom he had built in two weeks from fear, love, and the desperate need to do something while facing the possibility of losing me. I thought about the yellow hallway, the reading nook sketch he had kept since 2009, and the tagged stuffed bear still sitting in the garage.
He had not disappeared.
He had been afraid in a way he did not know how to explain.
“We were both terrified,” I said finally. “Just in completely different ways.”
He looked at me.
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I sat down across from him.
Beyond the sunroom glass, the garden had begun turning gold at the edges the way new gardens do in early evening, and for a while neither of us spoke, which became an answer of its own.
Weeks later, we sat in those same two chairs in the warm afternoon light.
The garden was blooming. The reading nook had become my favorite spot in the entire house.
—
Clara had come to visit twice, and both times Rowan made her coffee and asked about her other patients by name, because that is the kind of man he is—the kind of man I had nearly allowed myself to forget during two weeks of fear and silence.
“What happens now, Ro?”
He looked around the sunroom. At the garden through the glass. At the life we had spent twenty years treating like a faraway destination instead of a place we were already standing in.
“We stop saying one day. We just start.”
He reached across and took my hand.
Outside, the garden was doing exactly what we had always hoped it would do.
