It’s the one thing I’m absolutely sure of.

Everything else we’ll figure out as we go, like everybody does.

He did not believe me, not fully, not then.

How could he?

He had been promised permanence before, in one form or another, by people who had meant it in the moment and had given him back anyway.

Words were cheap in his experience; everyone said the right things at the start.

What he had learned to trust was not promises but patterns, the slow accumulation of a thousand small proofs over time, and so I understood that I would have to earn his belief the long way, by simply being there, unremarkably, day after day, until the pattern of my staying grew too long for even him to disbelieve.”