We did not take the bus.
We walked out the front door — Theo in his carrier, his head tucked under my chin, both of us wearing the same slightly sunscreen-scented smell of people who have been outdoors already today and are going out again — and we walked down the path that led through the garden and onto the street.
It was an ordinary street. Nice, but not extravagant. The kind of street where people say good morning to each other and mean it.
A woman walking a dog nodded at us. An elderly man sitting on his front step raised a hand. Theo, who had become extremely interested in dogs, craned his head and watched the retreating animal with an intensity that I found, as I found most things he did, disproportionately moving.
“That’s a dog,” I told him.
He made a sound that I had begun to interpret as agreement.
We kept walking. The afternoon opened around us — warm and unhurried and ours. Ahead, the street curved gently, and I did not know yet exactly where it would take us, and that was fine.
That was exactly fine.
The path forward was not paved with revenge. It was not paved with triumph. It was paved with small ordinary moments, accumulated day by day — a baby’s first laugh, a morning cup of tea drunk in peace, an afternoon walk in good light — until they added up to something that deserved the word: a life.
— End —
