Bev asked me, not long ago, over our Thursday coffee, what it was that turned it around — what the secret was, since she watches Hal and me now with a look I can only call hungry, the look of a woman who lost her chance and is glad, genuinely glad, that her friend didn’t lose hers.

I have thought hard about how to answer her, because I owe her a true answer; she is the one who told me to reach.

And the truest thing I can say is that there was no secret, no grand gesture, no single moment that fixed us.

There was only a shoebox on a hallway floor, and a friend who’d buried her husband telling me not to waste mine, and a slow song in the kitchen, and a hundred small brave reaches across a table we’d stopped reaching across, and the decision — made not once but daily, and still being made — to stop saving our marriage for a later that was never guaranteed to come.

We almost missed it, Hal and I.