“We had an accelerated timeline,” I said.
“Apparently,” she said.
And then she laughed — the real kind, unpolished and unplanned, the kind that arrives without permission. Sebastian looked at her laughing and something happened in his face that I understood immediately — the specific relief of seeing someone you love be actually, genuinely all right. Not performing it. Actually being it.
He smiled. The real one.
I looked at the two of them — Sebastian and Tovia, fifteen years of friendship across the kitchen table, everything that had been complicated between them now simply part of the shape of what they were to each other. Not erased. Not avoided. Just held, alongside everything else, without requiring resolution.
She left at eight.
Sebastian walked her to the garden gate — the old
