I woke up and he was still there.
This was the first thing — the simple fact of it. His arm around me, the weight of him solid and real in my bed, the February morning pressing gray light through the curtains. I lay still for a moment and let the realness of it arrive properly, the way you let your eyes adjust to a new light rather than forcing them.
He was still there.
He was breathing slowly, deeply, the specific unconscious rhythm of someone who had actually slept — not managed sleep, not the restless surface-sleep of a guilty conscience, but the real thing. I watched his chest rise and fall and thought about everything that had happened in the four months since a welcome home dinner on the Upper East Side and felt, underneath all the complexity, something that was simply and complet
