How guilty I felt whenever I laughed.
How some mornings I still woke expecting Sarah to be beside me.
When I finished, Claire reached across the table.
“You don’t have to stop loving her.”
I stared at her.
“I don’t?”
“Of course not.”
She smiled sadly.
“Love doesn’t disappear because another person arrives.”
Nobody had ever said that to me.
People had told me to move on.
Start over.
Find closure.
Claire never asked me to close anything.
She simply made room.
That was when I knew I loved her.
She entered Ari’s life just as carefully.
She never asked Ari to call her Mom.
She never removed Sarah’s photographs.
She never forced affection.
She colored when Ari wanted to color.
Read when Ari handed her a book.
Learned that dinosaurs required different voices depending on whether they were herbivores or “mean ones.”
One afternoon, I found them laughing beneath a blanket fort.
Neither noticed me watching from the hallway.
For the first time in years, happiness did not feel like betrayal.
It felt possible.
Two years later, Claire and I married.
The ceremony was small.
A garden.
White flowers.
