“You hurt me, Don.”
His eyes closed. “I know. And I will spend the rest of my life earning your forgiveness, if you let me.”
I walked back across the room and stopped in front of him.
“I wasn’t kind to you because I thought you’d reward me,” I said. “I was kind because you were a human being who was suffering.”
“I know that now,” he said.
“But that’s also why I’m not leaving.”
His head snapped up.
“I’m furious at the method,” I said, my voice shaking. “But what you were looking for… it was real. And I found it too. I fell in love with a man in a wheelchair, who snored, and cried in his sleep, and drank my terrible ginger tea. I loved that man.”
I knelt in front of him until we were eye to eye.
“The face doesn’t matter to me. It never did. The man who stands in front of me now is the same man who held my hand by the fire. I’m only sorry it took so long for him to believe it.”
He broke.
