This is the part that took me longest to make peace with, because I am not a cruel man, and there is a version of me — the old version, the one who kept the peace — that wanted very badly to walk across that field and take the bag of strawberry candies and let the whole thing dissolve into the easy warmth of reconciliation.

That version of me is exactly the problem.

That is the version that excused her for a year.

I have learned to be suspicious of my own hunger to forgive quickly, because in me it has never been generosity; it has been avoidance wearing generosity’s face, the wish to skip the hard, uncomfortable, ongoing work of consequences and get back to a comfortable room.

Real forgiveness, if it ever comes, will not look like me relieving my own discomfort at a chain-link fence.

It will look like Aurora, in her own time, deciding what she is able to offer.