It had died by a thousand small silences.

And so it could only be rebuilt the same way it had died, in reverse: not by one grand gesture but by ten thousand small honesties, the patient daily accumulation of true and ordinary sentences, actually said and actually heard.

There was no masterstroke available to me.

There was only the long, unglamorous, un-cinematic work of becoming, one conversation at a time, a person Rosalie could speak to honestly and be honestly heard by — the very work I had been too busy and too proud to do while I still had a marriage to do it in.

I had wanted a grand gesture because a grand gesture is fast, and dramatic, and flattering to the man who makes it.