She swirls her wine. “Is this white wine?”
“Yeah. Fruity. Thought you’d like it.”
“I do,” she says softly. “It tastes like summer. Like something hopeful.”
My chest tightens. She’s talking about wine, but it feels like she’s talking about us.
I watch her eat, savor, smile—and something settles into me.
Not hunger. Not desire.
Home.
And that’s terrifying.
Eventually, she leans back on her hands. “Can I tell you something?”
“Always.”
“It’s been just over a year,” she says. “Since the accident. But things changed. It’s not just the blindness. It’s everything that came with it. People didn’t mean to disappear, I don’t think. They just… drifted. They didn’t know how to ‘be’ around me. Conversations got shorter. Silences got longer. And somewhere along the way, I stopped knowing where I fit anymore. It made for a lonely existence.”
She twists her hands in the blanket. “I still don’t fit in. Even with Hattie, I still don’t. Not completely.”
I move closer, giving her space to pull away—she doesn’t.
“I never told anyone that,” she whispers. “Not even my therapist.”
“Thank you,” I say softly. “For trusting me.”
She gives a shaky laugh. “It’s easier when I can’t see you.”
“I’m glad,” I admit, “because I don’t think I’m hiding how much that moved me.”
Her breath stutters.
“What about you?” she asks gently. “You said you and your friends were abandoned. How horrible.”
I freeze.
There is no safe version of my life story, but I want to give her something.
“I grew up in a commune,” I say. “Survival training camp pretending to be a community.”
I hate lying to her.
But I can’t tell her the truth. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“So yeah,” I continue, “my friends and I got left behind. Had to make our own way. We had no safety net.”
She inhales softly. “That sounds awful. Were you lonely?”
The question cuts right through me. “Yes,” I admit. “I still am, sometimes.”
Her fingers tighten around mine. “That must have been so difficult. To feel like you had to carry everything alone.”
She doesn’t know how close she is to the truth.
“I guess I got used to it,” I say.
