He wrote back within a minute. “Yes. Please.”
That afternoon, I sat across from Harold in his living room, my hands cold in my lap. I made myself ask about the thing he’d left out that morning.
“The tattoo wasn’t only about Mike, was it?”
He didn’t answer.
“I’ve seen the way you look at us, Harold. I heard Benjamin at the party. The second-floor rebuild. That’s for Mia and me, isn’t it?”
His shoulders folded inward.
When he finally spoke, his voice was small.
“Somewhere this year, it stopped being just about Mike. I started picturing it. A room for Mia. A life. I never said anything. But I was subconsciously setting the table for it.”
I let the silence sit.
“I won’t cross a line,” he said quickly. “Keep the job. I’ll back off. We can go back to how it was.”
For a long second, I almost said yes.
I thought about Mia’s tuition and the mortgage.
Then I understood that staying, even carefully, would keep me exactly where I’d been. Frozen. Borrowed.
“You’re not a bad man, Harold. You’re a grieving one. And I’ve been leaning so hard that I let the lines blur too.”
