She always seemed surprised, almost touched. That we bothered asking instead of simply discarding things that weren’t ours to decide about.
Deloris still visits, still occasionally leaves a stray mug somewhere it shouldn’t be.
But she knocks first. She asks before touching things. She’s stopped, entirely, repeating the sentence that once defined every single visit she ever made to my home.
Some Sundays, watching her play a board game with Milo and Dahlia at my kitchen table, coffee mug carefully coasted. Shoes left neatly by the door. I catch myself almost forgetting the woman who. Once tracked mud across my floors without a second thought.
She laughs differently now too, I’ve noticed, less performed, less designed for an audience. More genuinely amused by whatever silly joke Milo’s just made about the game they’re playing. Dahlia beats her at cards more often than not these days, and Deloris takes the losses with actual grace. Something that would have been unthinkable a couple years earlier.
There’s an ease between them now that took real time to build, the kind that can’t be rushed or faked. Built purely out of consistent, ordinary Sundays stacked one after another. Watching them now, you’d never guess the history underneath it. The filing cabinet, the confrontation, the three tense weeks that led there. That’s probably exactly how it should look, eventually. Ordinary. Unremarkable. Nothing left to prove anymore.
