As I pulled away, Alex snapped the chopsticks together a few times. “These are dirty,” he said, like he’d just realized it. “You probably shouldn’t use them.”

I giggled at the look on his face, my heart lightening. “I can make another pair,” I replied.

“Cool.” He handed them to me. “Make me one, too, okay?”

*  *  *

We stayed up talking late into the night with Alex’s parents. Eventually, we moved into the living room, where Alex and I curled up together on the couch. The closeness was like a balm, soothing all the surface hurts while we focused on the deeper ones.

Sometimes we talked about the accident, and sometimes we talked about what we planned to do for the next couple of days, but no one brought up the future. I don’t think Alex or I were ready to make any big decisions yet. We were still licking our wounds, still raw from the past couple of days and all the days that had come before.

We slept in the same bedroom we’d shared at Thanksgiving, and I woke up the next morning feeling refreshed in a way that hours spent in bed had never given me. I think what I was feeling was hope, but at the time I was too nervous to give that feeling a name.

Over the next few days, Alex and I went on long walks through the forest. We spent time quietly and gratefully falling further in love with each other. I told him stories about my parents, and he told me about his birth mother and what it had been like when she’d fallen into a depression so deep that even her twin sons hadn’t been able to pull her out of it.

I wasn’t blind to the parallels in our stories, and I held Alex’s hand a little tighter as we walked slowly through the trees. He’d lost his first mother because she hadn’t been able to climb out of the dark pit she’d fallen into, and after that, my husband had felt responsible his entire life for being the person who made others happy. He’d taken on that role with Abraham, and though I knew he wasn’t ready to hear it, I came to realize that he’d done the same for me.

His family gave us the space we needed to get back on our feet, but by the end of the week, our alone time was up.

“I missed you,” Ani said, rushing through the front door of Liz and Dan’s house, Abraham carrying Arie in behind her. She hugged me hard, then pulled back to get a good look at me. “You’re doing better,” she said. “Good. You looked like shit before.”