We got coffee after. Just coffee. He told me about fabrication deadlines and artists who wanted impossible things. I told him about paint colors and mortgage documents and how weird it felt to buy a couch without picturing my mother’s opinion hovering over it like a weather system. He laughed at the right places. He listened when I spoke. He never once asked whether I’d reconciled with my family, which was maybe the kindest thing anyone had done all year.
When we stepped back out onto the street, the city smelled like rain warming off pavement and someone nearby was selling roasted nuts from a cart. Traffic growled. A siren whined somewhere distant. Ordinary life, loud and inelegant and completely uninterested in neat moral lessons.
Ruben glanced at me. “You okay?”
I looked up at the bright slice of sky between buildings.
Not healed in the dramatic way. Not transformed into one of those women who thanks adversity for making her stronger. I still startled sometimes when my phone rang from unknown numbers. I still had days when my mother’s letter burned in my drawer like a banked coal. I still thought of Naples when I smelled hot oil near water.
But okay?
Yes.
“I am,” I said.
And I meant it.