“Yes.”
“You should have insisted on seeing me when I stopped using the camera.”
“Yes.”
“But you did not shave my head.”
I looked at her.
“You did not starve me. You did not take my medicine. You did not put me in that shed.”
“I left you with them.”
“And then you came home.”
There are some sentences forgiveness cannot erase.
That one helped me live beside what I could not change.
Two years after my return, Phedra’s doctors gave us the best scan report we had received since treatment restarted. Not a promise. Not a fairy-tale declaration that cancer had vanished forever.
Good news.
We had learned to respect good news.
That evening, Phedra came onto the porch wearing a blue dress.
Around her neck was the hummingbird pendant.
I stared.
She smiled.
“Don’t make it weird.”
“I thought you didn’t want it.”
“I didn’t.”
“And now?”
She touched it gently.
