The follow-up scans were clean, and stayed clean. The condition that had hidden in her for years finally had a name, which meant it finally had a treatment plan, which meant the future stopped being a thing she braced against and became a thing she was allowed to make plans inside of.

She took the framed photograph off the dresser — the two paper cups, my thumb against hers — and she put it on the mantel of the apartment, in the open, where you’re supposed to keep the pictures you’ve decided to stop being afraid of.

And the letter — For Ethan, only if I lose courage — she gave to me herself, eventually, unsealed, on an ordinary evening with no emergency anywhere in the room.

I read it at her kitchen table while she watched, and it said everything Dr. Patel had said and one thing he hadn’t. At the bottom, beneath all of it, in the careful hand I’d kept in a shoebox under a bed I no longer slept in, she’d written:

If you’re reading this, it means I didn’t get the chance to find out whether you’d have chosen me on a day when nothing was on fire. That’s the only part I’m truly sorry about.

Not the marriage. The not knowing.

I looked up. She was still there. Nothing was on fire.

“Ask me again,” I said.

She did.

THE END.