And years from now — years after this moment — they’ll be sitting together at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning, laughing at something on the radio. He’ll tell her, out of the blue — for the first time in years — that he loves her.
And she’ll feel tears in her eyes in an instant, in a gorgeous swell of grateful relief in her belly, knots unfasting she’d forgotten were even there. And he’ll tell her that for him, it’s a choice. Her, Thomas, the house, their life together — it’s all a choice. And he’ll take her hand and he’ll say that for him — for Benjamin — there is no “fate”. There is no “meant to be”. There is only ever what we decide. And that for him, that’s not depressing. That actually, the constant possibility of something other than this is the only thing that makes this mean anything.
And he’ll say that even now, outside the front door, the world is pressing possibilities and people and places up against the wood and the glass, but that he doesn’t even care because here, out of everywhere, is where he chooses to be. And she, out of everyone, is who he wants to be here with.