He would have found the not-knowing — whether Rosalie and I will fully find each other again — unbearable, and would have pushed for a resolution, a definition, a commitment, on his own timeline, for his own comfort, exactly as he had once pushed for a divorce rather than sit in the discomfort of a hard conversation.

I am learning to sit in it instead.

To let the question stay open, because it is hers as much as mine, and because rushing it would only be one more way of putting my need ahead of her healing.

If we find our way back, it will be because it was true and unforced, arrived at in her time.

And if we do not, I will still have my son, and I will still have become, in the trying, a man worth more than the one who nearly lost them both.