I stop at a flower shop on the way home.
I’ve passed it a hundred times without registering it existed. The florist looks up when I walk in, mildly startled.
“A bouquet of…” I scratch my head. “Whatever’s best.”
“Any special occasion?”
I think about Nora—the garbage bag, about her sleeping on the closet floor, about the way she soundlessly cried in the back of my car after her father just sold her to me.
“Yeah, the occasion is…” I pause for a moment. “I love my wife.”
Nora is in the bedroom when I get home, folding laundry. Always working. Always doing.
She turns when she hears me, and her eyes go straight to the red roses. The reaction moves across her face in layers—surprise, delight, then the quick shuttering—the instinct to close off before a good thing can be snatched away.
I hand them over. “For my lovely wife.”
She buries her face in the blooms, and something in her shoulders releases. “They’re beautiful.”
“So are you.”
The blush moves up her neck. She’s not used to compliments, and I make a mental note to increase their frequency.
“Pack a bag,” I tell her. “We leave tomorrow morning.”
She looks up. “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere quiet. Just us.”
The wariness flickers in. “But don’t you have work?—”
“Work can wait. You’re more important.”
She opens her mouth to argue. Closes it. Studies my face.
“Okay,” she says. “If you want to.”
Ifyouwant to. She’s still framing everything through my desires, not her own. Still positioning herself as the one who accommodates.
I cross to her. Cup her face in my hands.
“I want you to stop trying to be perfect. Stop trying to earn your place here.”
“I’m not?—”
“You are. And I need you to stop. Because you already have your place. It’s secure.”
She holds very still under my hands.
“Can you try to believe that?”
“I’ll try,” she says.
It’s not the confident yes I want. But it’s something. And she’s looking at me with eyes that, while wide and uncertain, are so goddamn gorgeous. I remind myself that patience isn’t weakness. With her, patience is the whole fight.
I pull her in and kiss her, slow and thorough, until her hands slide up to my chest and she relaxes and melts into me.
We order takeout. She picks the movie—something with subtitles she’s embarrassed about, which means I watch it with my full attention and find I don’t mind at all. She curls into my side. The tension she’s been carrying doesn’t disappear, but it loosens.
