writing: she would call me whenever she thought of a plan too large to manage alone. She read it aloud, then stopped. The bus moved past a brick church and a row of houses while she looked out the window.
Neither page mentioned marriage. Neither imagined a separate household clearly enough to exclude the other person. We had described careers, travel, apartments, and ambitions while quietly assuming the one thing we had never dared define.
“Well,” she said eventually. “That’s difficult to defend.”
I watched her fold the papers back
