We danced.

We were old and we were rusty and Hal still could not really dance, forty years of marriage and the man still counts under his breath, and it was, without any competition, the finest dance of my entire life.

Because it was not the dancing of two people showing off.

It was the dancing of two people who had lost each other for twenty-five years in the middle of their own marriage and found their way back, in time, just in time, with time still left.

He turned me under his arm and caught me coming back, the way he’d learned to before we were married, and I trusted him to be there, and he was, and we moved together, wordless, in time, on the same floor where a bad dancer in a borrowed jacket once stepped on my feet and stole my whole life.