I’m sorry I learned too late how to stay.
I fold it once, gently, then again. I don’t keep it, but I don’t destroy it either. Some echoes don’t need answers. They only need somewhere to land. My hands shake, but the pain doesn’t cut the way it once did. It lands softly. Settles.
The house hums with quiet conversations, shared stories, held silences. I sit for a moment on the old love seat on the deck, the one my grandparents used to sit on in the evenings, holding hands without speaking.
I remember them here. Music drifting from the radio. My grandmother humming. My grandfather pretending not to cry when she laughed.
Love like that doesn’t shout.
It stays.
Dane sits beside me, shoulder to shoulder. The city feels far away. The future feels close. I breathe in peach tea and fresh air and the strange, steady peace of knowing I am exactly where I am meant to be.
And for the first time in a long time, the ache in my chest isn’t asking to be filled.
It’s simply asking to be honoured.
Dane sits beside me, shoulder to shoulder. The city feels far away. The future feels close.
And for the first time since grief cracked my life open, I don’t feel like I’m standing in the aftermath.
I feel like I’m standing inside the answer.
Time doesn’t announce itself when it moves on.
It just starts showing up differently.
Messy tables. Overlapping grief and joy. Life continuing without apology.
The first thing that changes is our address.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just a gradual loosening from the city apartment and a leaning toward the coast. Dane finds the villa the way he finds most things. Quietly. Thoroughly. Already imagining how it will work rather than how it will look.
Whitewashed timber. Low windows. A deck that catches the morning light. The ocean close enough to hear when the wind turns. It smells like salt and sun-warmed wood before we even move our things in.
“This feels right,” I say the first morning we wake there.
Dane hums his agreement, barefoot on the deck, coffee in hand, watching the water like it’s something he intends to keep.
We keep the apartment in the city. Not as a backup. As a tool. A place to land when work demands it. A place with height and glass and motion. But home becomes the coast. The villa holds our quieter selves. The ones that need space to breathe.
Gracie’s Sanctuary runs without me hovering now. Elma and Peter hold it steady. Anita’s art continues to grow along the walls, gold leaf catching light where hands shake most. Healthcare workers come through often. Learning the space. Memorising it. Knowing where to send parents when the worst words are spoken.
The house holds grief.
Our villa holds joy.
And the publishing house holds voices.
Work expands in ways I didn’t predict but somehow prepared for. Manuscripts stack up. Editors argue passionately. New names appear on contracts. I don’t try to be everywhere anymore. I build systems. I trust people. I let the work live without me gripping its throat.
The slowing begins before I understand what it is.
It isn’t cinematic.
It’s nausea that comes and goes. Fatigue that settles into my bones like fog. The way my body feels unfamiliar in small, unsettling ways. I tell myself it’s stress. Travel. Life.
Then I sit on the bathroom floor with a test in my hand and laugh and cry at the same time, the sound strange and almost feral.
