“And I’m not going anywhere tonight,” I added. “We don’t have to prove anything to each other. We can sit here, drink our milk, and talk until the sun comes up if that’s what you need.”
She looked at me for several seconds.
Then she smiled.
“I think the milk is cold.”
I laughed so suddenly that she began laughing too.
For the first time that evening, the tension in her shoulders eased.
We changed into comfortable clothes, made fresh tea, and sat together on the sofa.
There was no dramatic embrace that magically erased the past. No single sentence that made forty years of fear disappear.
Anna still flinched when I moved too quickly.
She still apologized when she thought she had spoken too much.
And every now and then, her eyes drifted toward the bedroom as though she were remembering why she had been afraid to go there in the first place.
