I thought, back then, the way I suspect most estranged people think, that the estrangement was a kind of permanent verdict — that a rupture, once it hardened, was simply the truth of a relationship now, a settled fact you built the rest of your life around.

What I did not understand is that a rupture is not a verdict.

It is only a wound no one has yet done the work of tending, and wounds can be tended at any point, even late, even over a dead mother’s belongings, even after nine years — not healed clean, not made never-to-have-happened, but tended, closed, turned from an open thing into a scar you can live beside.

The nine years are real; Terry and I do not pretend otherwise, because the kind of reunion that erases the past is a fantasy and we are both too old and too honest for it.