She could love Andrew and still require him to earn his way back through it — to prove, over time, in actions rather than tears, that the man returning was not the man who had left.

Andrew agreed to all of it, without argument, because some part of him understood that Maria’s conditions were not obstacles to his return but the only real path to it, the difference between being let back in out of pity and being welcomed back out of trust rebuilt.

He would answer for what he had done.

And then, if he did the work, he would be allowed to try.

There was a wisdom in Maria’s conditions that Daniel came to admire more the longer he thought about it, because it threaded a needle that most people, in her position, get wrong in one direction or the other.