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The complications. The emergency. The choice that wasn’t really a choice.
“You were always worth knowing,” I said.
My mom had known. She never told me. Never pushed.
Just left a key and a promise and trusted that it would matter when it needed to.
That night, I realized something else.
I wasn’t broken because Daniel betrayed me.
I mean, yes, that hurt. That would probably hurt for a long time.
But the real pain, the thing that hollowed me out, was believing I’d lost my chance at a family.
At the life I’d been building in my head for two years.
Standing there, watching Eli rock his daughter by the fireplace, I felt something unfamiliar.
Time passed.
Eli didn’t rush anything, and neither did I.
We cooked together. He showed me how to properly swaddle the baby so she’d stop fussing at three in the morning.
We took turns holding her, walking her, singing off-key lullabies that probably traumatized her tiny ears.
We talked about grief, loss, and the people we loved and lost, and wished we’d had more time with.
One evening, snow falling soft and steady outside, I told him about the bracelets. About Daniel and Angela and the two years I’d spent building a life that turned out to be half fiction.
He reached for my hand.
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