He looked at the message for a long time.
I wondered how long it would take.
Seven words. No punctuation at the end. No exclamation mark, no question mark, nothing that softened or inflected or indicated how she meant it. Just the words themselves sitting on his screen with the patient weight of something that had been waiting fifteen years to be said and had finally found its moment.
He put the phone down.
Picked it up.
Put it down again.
He had sent the email. He had typed it and deleted it and typed it again and then sent it before he could talk himself out of it and now she had responded in under four hours with seven words that told him nothing and everything simultaneously.
I wondered how long it would take.
Which meant she had been wondering.
Which meant some part of her ha
