Her eyes filled.
“All at once?”
“All at once.”
She nodded.
“Okay.”
We stood there until Lucy called from the car to complain that she was freezing.
Then Rebecca and I walked back together.
Not like sisters restored by some miracle.
Not like nothing had happened.
And not as the two young women we’d been before a motel fire gave one of us the chance to vanish and forced the other to learn how to survive being left behind.
We walked back as two middle-aged women carrying different versions of the same loss.
Rebecca had spent twelve years learning that freedom built on silence eventually becomes another kind of prison.
I had spent twelve years learning how to live without her, only to discover that loving someone who returned could be harder than mourning someone who never would.
There was no getting our old life back.
That was the part I finally stopped wanting.
