There are moments when a life feels like it’s being turned gently in a pair of hands—examined, weighted, decided upon. Other times it feels like a corner of the house has been shoved in hard and the beams groan. This week had a bit of both.
Spring had been good to us: jobs steady, the crew humming, Elena at the diner stocking enough pie to keep the town from thinking too hard about scandal. Mark and I had finally started to use the tin box—not yet for ring plans but for smaller tokens: a receipt for a paid permit, a scrap of paper with a client’s unexpected compliment, a ticket stub from a messy little concert where we’d laughed until we cried. We’d promised, quietly, to keep adding things to it: proof that the life we’d built was more than rumor and survival.
Saturday morning, we slept
