I would catch my own reflection in a dark window at two in the morning and not entirely recognize the tired woman looking back.

And yet — this is the thing I did not expect — I would not undo it.

Because somewhere in the long erasure of myself, something else was being written that I could not see at the time.

I was becoming a person who knew, all the way down, what she was capable of.

Most people never find that out.

They go their whole lives without ever being asked to love someone past the point of exhaustion, past reward, past being seen.

I was asked.