Elena looked up at him, at a man who six months ago had been a stranger she'd left in a hotel room before dawn, who was now standing on a street corner promising to stay through uncertainty he had no way of controlling or fixing, and felt something in her chest that she recognized, with a kind of quiet alarm, as trust beginning to take root whether she'd given it permission to or not.
"Okay," she said. "Three weeks."
The three weeks that followed were, in Elena's estimation, some of the longest of her entire life.
Work became the only reliable distraction — she threw herself into two corporate holiday parties and the early planning stages of a spring wedding, grateful for every logistical crisis that gave her mind somewhere else to go besides the follow-up scan circling ever closer on h
