He seemed satisfied with that and went back to watching me chop vegetables with the focused interest of someone considering whether to help or not.
He did not ask about Dani again.
The bear was back on his shelf, between the dinosaur and the rocket ship, and if he remembered where it had been, he didn’t say so.
I saw Patricia twice more in those months.
Once to review the postnuptial framework she had drafted, which Ryan had agreed to sign without negotiation.
Once to tell her I wasn’t ready to use it yet — that I was still deciding.
“You don’t have to decide on anyone else’s schedule,” she said both times.
I started running in the mornings.
Not for any reason I could have explained clearly at the start.
Just because the house was quiet at six AM and I needed somewhere to put the energy that had nowhere to go.
By April I was running four miles without thinking about it.
Dana came over on weekends when Toby was with Ryan.
We watched things on television and ate food that wasn’t good for us and talked about everything and nothing.
She didn’t push me to decide either.
She was the best kind of company — present without pressure.
