Years of regret.
Years of trying.
I picked up the little folded letter again. The wobbly pencil. The backward letters.
I am going to be a docter and fix your eyes. I promise.
“You should have told me,” I said quietly.
“I know,” he whispered. “I was wrong.”
He didn’t argue. He didn’t say but. He didn’t explain why it was understandable.
He just said it. I was wrong.
I stood up.
My legs were shaky. My head was pounding. My eyes ached from all the light, from all the crying. Dr. Osei would have been furious with me.
I walked around the desk.
I stepped closer to him.
And I looked at his face.
Really looked at it. For the first time.
Not the scar. Not the eight-year-old boy behind the swing. Him. My husband.
I saw the exhaustion. The deep shadows under his eyes from twenty-seven years of two a.m. mornings. The lines around his mouth from all the times he’d laughed at my burned dinners. The gray in his hair that I’d never known was there.
