He didn’t have an answer. For the first time in eighteen years of knowing him, Matthew Reyes had absolutely nothing to say.
The book came out anyway, four months later, because by then it was printed, distributed, and legally out of both our hands. I did the interviews. I did the readings. I stood in front of strangers and answered questions about stories I hadn’t technically chosen to finish, in a voice that was mine, about endings someone else had written for me out of love and fear and a complete failure to ask permission.
Matthew and I spent that spring in couples counseling instead of celebrating anything. Slowly, awkwardly, he learned to say what do you think we should do instead of already having handled it by the time I walked in the door. Slowly, I learned that the fear he’d spent a lifetime trying to out-plan wasn’t something he could love out of me — it was something I had to walk through myself, badly, on my own schedule, even if that meant more almosts before I got there.
