He showed up in sweatpants and an old college T-shirt, toolbox in hand.
“You know, you could’ve just waited until tomorrow,” he said, crouching to look under the sink.
He laughed, that easy laugh I’d heard a thousand times. And something in my chest shifted.
After that, we slipped into a new rhythm.
Coffee on Sunday mornings.
Movies on Friday nights.
Long talks about kids, work, growing older, and how life rarely turns out the way we planned.
It felt comfortable. Safe. Less like a dramatic new romance and more like finding a room in a house you’d lived in for years but never noticed before.
My kids picked up on it before I did.
“Mom,” my daughter said during winter break, “you know Dan is in love with you, right?”
She gave me the kind of look only a grown child can give a parent.
“Mom. Please. Open your eyes.”
I didn’t know what to do with that thought.
Part of me still felt like loving anyone after Peter was somehow disloyal. Like my heart had already had its one great love and there wasn’t room for anything else.
Dan never pushed. He never even hinted.
And that, I think, made it easier to admit the truth when it finally came.
A Porch, A Sunset, And A Confession
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