Rebecca Serle

And I think that maybe that is what love is. Not the absence of space but the acknowledgment of it, the thing that lives between the parts, the thing that makes it possible not to be one, but to be different, to be two.

The future is the one thing you can count on not abandoning you, kid, he’d said. The future always finds you. Stand still, and it will find you. The way the land just has to run to sea.

—MARIANNE WIGGINS, EVIDENCE OF THINGS UNSEEN

David is staring at me with a look I’ve never seen before. He’s looking at me as if he’s already gone.

I’m on my second cup of strong and bitter black coffee. I don’t deserve creamer.

I still go to the chemo appointments, I just don’t go upstairs. I sit in the lobby and read through work emails until I know Bella’s finished

But you know, Dannie, because it’s in the lymph, it’s really about containment.

I’m glad,” he says. “Because either way, you’re stuck with me.”

And I, I want to share all my love, with you. No one else will do

“You have to make choices sometimes for yourself. It doesn’t make you a bad friend, it just means you put yourself first, which you should.”

That five-year plan I expressed to Aldridge isn’t just mine, it’s ours. We came up with it six months into dating, when it was obvious this thing between us was serious. David will transition out of investment banking and begin working at a hedge fund — more opportunity for big money, less corporate bureaucracy. We didn’t even argue about where we want to live — it’s always been Gramercy for both of us. The rest was a fluid negotiation. We never came to an impasse.