The thing about happily was that it was not a destination.
She'd spent enough time in the before to know that happy endings were a narrative convenience, not a state of being. What you actually arrived at, when you arrived somewhere good, was not an ending but a different quality of continuing. The problems didn't stop. The complexity didn't resolve. The world did not part for you. You just got to face the ongoing, imperfect, irreducible business of being alive with better company and more solid ground underfoot.
She was thinking about this in November, sitting on the kitchen sofa on a Sunday morning with a nursing textbook in her lap and the sounds of Leonardo and Daniel in the other room doing something that involved what appeared to be a disagreement about the correct way to build a s
