cried and then said: “I’d have come with you. Any day. You only had to say.”
And I said I know.
And she said: “Did you not want me there?”
And the honest answer, which I gave her, is that I did not want anybody there, because somebody being there would have made it real, and I had got through eleven months by making sure nothing was.
And the four months between the paperwork and the March, which were the best four months I have had since the January of 2025.
Something changed on the day Ruth Benedek put that form in an envelope, and it changed in him, not in me, and I was not expecting it at all.
He got louder. He started coming out of his room for things he had been skipping.
He went to the quiz. He had not been to the quiz since 2023
