SERA

I gave him three days.

Three days of something approaching normalcy eating meals together, training in the mornings, the careful, tentative negotiation of two people who'd been through hell and were trying to figure out if the other side had anything left to build on. He was trying. I could see it in the way he left his study door open, in the way he asked about my day and actually waited for the answer, in the way he reached for my hand at dinner with a hesitancy that was so different ...