I stop. Not abruptly, just enough to let the space open up between us. She turns back to face me, her guard up, ready for the hook.
“There is one,” I say.
She braces.
“It costs certainty. The kind that comes from someone else deciding the shape of your world. You won’t get that from me.”
She searches my face, looking for the fine print, the hidden debt. She won’t find it.
“Okay,” she says softly. “I can live with that.”
We start walking again. The path curves, trees thinning as the sun breaks through the clouds in uneven, golden patches. She steps into the light without hesitation, letting it stripe her face and shoulders. She isn’t hiding from the brightness anymore.
“I used to think recognition meant being known,” she says. “Now I think it just means being seen without being stopped.”
“That’s closer.”
“And you?” she asks. “What does it mean to you?”
I don’t give her poetry. I give her the truth that keeps me up at night. “It means not interfering when someone becomes themselves. Even if it changes where they stand with you.”
She absorbs that in silence. We reach a fork in the path. One way leads back to the familiar, crowded streets; the other disappears into a stretch of wild green that doesn’t seem to care who traverses it. She looks at both, then at me.
“I’m going this way,” she says, pointing toward the green.
I nod. “I know.”
She studies me for a second longer, then turns and starts down the path. After a few steps, she glances back—not to check if I’m following, but to acknowledge that I am. I fall in beside her, matching her pace, leaving the space she needs.
It’s the most deliberate thing I’ve ever chosen. No grasping, no guiding. Just two people moving in the same direction because they want to be there.
The path opens into a clearing where the trees pull back and the light pools like an invitation. She steps into the centre of it and turns in a slow circle, checking the ground. It holds. She sits on a low stone, half-hidden by moss, and I sit beside her. Not touching. Just present.
“I don’t want to perform healing,” she says suddenly, her voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t want to be ‘recovered’ or anything neat.”
“You don’t have to be. Healing isn’t a job interview.”
She laughs—a real, surprised sound that echoes through the trees. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve heard in years.
“I don’t know how to do this without rules,” she says.
“Then don’t. Do it without permission instead.”
She leans back on her hands, looking up at the dappled sky. The light fragments across her face, imperfect and striking.
“Stay,” she says.
It isn’t a plea. It’s a preference.
I stay. We sit as the afternoon deepens and the air cools. No claiming. No ownership. Just a shared presence that doesn’t need a name to be real.
Eventually, she stands and dusts her palms on her jeans. “I’m ready to go.”
“Where?”
She smiles—small, certain, and entirely her own. “Forward.”
I rise with her, and we walk out of the clearing together. No markers left behind. No proof. Some moments don’t need to be recorded. They just need to be lived.
