Chapter 209

• When Julian first told me about the offer, it had sounded like a distant storm cloud. I had heard the words, felt the shift in the air around us, but I had not yet felt the rain on my skin. In the days that followed, the reality settled in slowly, threading itself into our conversations, shaping the silences between us. It was never spoken as a threat or a demand. It was simply there, a truth that could not be ignored, and we met it together.
• We did not argue about it. That surprised me most. Perhaps I expected the fear in me to ignite into anger, or perhaps I thought Julian would grow defensive as if the offer itself were some kind of betrayal. None of that happened. What unfolded instead was something quieter and far more difficult. We spoke about it openly, again and again, circling around the same questions, peeling back the same uncertainties, until the act of speaking became its own form of intimacy.
• Some evenings it was gentle. We would be cooking dinner and he would mention the city where the project was based, wondering aloud what it might feel like to live there, what kind of people he might meet, how the air might smell in the mornings. I listened, not with resentment but with the ache of knowing that his imagination was already reaching outward.