I almost kissed her on Sunday and cooked her dinner on Monday and by Tuesday I was running a full internal audit on every decision I'd made in the last three weeks.
The conclusion was inconvenient: I hadn't made a single one that wasn't shaped by her.
Not dramatically. Not, obviously. But Claire had become the variable I was quietly accounting for in everything — what time I came home, which calls I pushed, whether I ate lunch or worked through it. I was reorganizing my life around a woman I'd married on a contract and calling it a coincidence, which was the most dishonest thing I'd done in years.
I didn't do anything dishonest. Not with myself.
So I sat with it Tuesday morning, coffee going cold, and acknowledged it cleanly the way I acknowledged every uncomfortable truth: she mattere
