I watched his shoulders shake.

The anger that had carried me through the rainy drive, the cold vinyl chairs, and Sylvia’s bitter words in the exam room began to turn into something else.

It wasn’t a sudden rush of affection, and it didn’t erase four months of secret receipts.

It was the quiet realization that the structure we had built on false pretenses had finally collapsed, leaving something plain and real behind.

Ethan lowered his hands and looked at me, his eyes rimmed with red.