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I need the person I love to believe my voice belongs in the choices that shape my life.

I had heard the words. I had even answered them.

I understand.

I thought I did. Standing alone beneath these fluorescent lights, I realized I had not. Not truly. I had listened to her story and imagined another man.

I had never imagined she was warning me.

* * *

Emilia

The last hour was the most uneventful of the entire night, and I have never been so grateful.

They took my blood. They monitored my oxygen levels on the small glowing monitor clipped to my finger. It stayed where it should. They asked the same questions more than once. Most of my answers were some variation of I don’t know or no.

“How is Victoria?” I asked.

“She’s still very ill. But she’s receiving exactly the care she needs.”

“Thank you.”

The doctor studied me for a moment before making another note on the chart.

“We’ll get you cleared shortly. Then I’d like you to go home and get some sleep.”

They cleared me a little after that. I pulled my coat on and discovered the urgency had finally left my body. What remained was exhaustion. By then, I was too tired to force my thoughts into any kind of order. Tomorrow would come soon enough. Tonight, it was enough to walk toward the exit.

When I stepped out of the hospital room, I looked up.

He was standing there, near the door. He was not hovering.

I noticed that immediately because I had expected him to be.

He must have been here for hours, still wearing the clothes from the morning, his hands loose at his sides, carrying the stillness of a man who had decided his waiting should demand nothing from anyone else.

When he saw me, he straightened.

He did not come toward me. He waited.

I crossed most of the distance between us before I realized he had left it for me to choose.

“They cleared you,” he said. It was not quite a question.

“They did.”

Relief crossed his face so quickly, I almost missed it.

“May I take you home?” he asked.

It was such a small question.

May I?

Two ordinary words he had used with me so many times. They had become his way of loving me. He knew how to ask. He simply hadn’t asked when it mattered most.

The words undid something inside me precisely because they carried no assumption. He wasn’t asking for agreement with a decision he had already made. He was asking permission. Whether it meant anything beyond that moment, I didn’t know. But, to me, it meant everything.