Emily sat at her kitchen table and looked at her hands and breathed.
“Okay,” she said, after a moment.
“Okay,” he agreed.
“Monday?”
“Monday.”
She put the phone down and sat for a while in the quiet of her new apartment, in the thin autumn light coming through the window, in the particular quality of a morning that is both an ending and a beginning. She thought about the person she had been for the last two years—quieter, more careful, perpetually adjusting herself to fit a space that had never been built for her. She thought about the person she had been before that—the one who carried a cheap ballpoint pen and stayed up until three in the morning rewriting business projections because she could see what was wrong with them and knew how to fix it.
She had not lost that person. She had just put her down for a while, the way you put down something heavy when the carrying gets hard, meaning to pick it up again when you have the strength.
She had the strength now.
She picked up her own pen—a cheap ballpoint, same as always—and opened a clean notebook to the first page, and she began to write.