I'm not the person I was before Sarah died. He said I'll never be that person, but I'm also not. He stopped. I'm not only that loss anymore. I'm other things, too.
I just forgot to look at them for a while. He met her eyes. You helped me remember they were there. She set her water glass down carefully. Ethan, she said, "Yeah, stop deciding what you're allowed to feel."
Her voice was very quiet and very direct. Just feel it. I'm right here. He looked at her. He looked at her the way he hadn't let himself look at her in two years of careful professional distance fully without the managed version of himself as a filter.
He looked at the woman who had sat on his lap in a crowded bar and looked at an empty seat and stayed. Who had shown up with a glittery sign, who had learned his daughter's bedtime and his coffee order and which stories he liked to tell and had held all of it without being asked. "I'm in love with you," he said. He hadn't planned to say it. It came out of the fullness of the moment, out of the looking, out of four years of not saying true things and the accumulated exhaustion of that restraint.
The table went very still. Clare looked at him for a long moment. Her eyes were bright. Not with tears exactly, with something that was just the other side of them. "That's the most terrifying thing you've ever said to me," she said.
"I know you said it anyway." I did. She reached across the table. She put her hand over his. Not briefly, she left it there.
I'm in love with you, too, she said. I have been for a while. I was just waiting for you to find your way back to yourself enough to hear it. He turned his hand over and held hers. The restaurant moved around them.
The bread was good. The food when it came was good. The conversation moved the way it always did between them from real things to lighter things and back to real things. easy and honest and occasionally so funny that she laughed the way she laughed and the people at the next table turned a look. He drove her home at the end of the night, walked her to her door because he was that kind of man regardless of the era. On her doorstep, she looked up at him.
The night air was sharp and clear. He kissed her, not grandly, not with the choreography of movie moments, just quietly, directly, with four years of waiting behind it and his whole heart in it. And she kissed him back the same way, and it lasted exactly long and know that everything after this was going to be different. She pulled back and looked at him. "Hi," she said softly.
"Hi," he said. He smiled back. "Go home, Ethan," she said. "Call me tomorrow. I'll call you tomorrow, he agreed.