I don’t know how to explain why I didn’t send him away. I only know that I didn’t.
We started talking. About the sea first, the way you do with strangers. Then about life, the way you do when conversation opens something unexpected. I told him my age within the first twenty minutes — not because I was warning him off, but because I’d spent too many years softening truths and I was tired of it. I told him I was married. I told him I wasn’t going to make any promises.
He nodded calmly, as if I’d simply told him the weather. “I don’t want anything except these few days,” he said. “No future, no plans, no obligations.”
I should have gotten up then. I know that now. I knew it then, somewhere beneath the wine and the salt air and the particular mercy of being far from home.
I didn’t get up.
Seven Days
His name was Daniel.
He was twenty-six. He was spending September at the coast between jobs, between chapters, in that particular between-space that the young sometimes inhabit and the rest of us remember from a distance. He had an easy laugh and serious eyes and the capacity — rarer than it should be — to actually listen.
With him I didn’t feel forty-four. I didn’t feel like the tired wife who had learned to endure and stay quiet. I felt like a woman — alive, desired, present — in a way I hadn’t in so long that I’d almost stopped noticing the absence.
We walked along the shore at night. We swam in the warm sea. We laughed for no reason, and sat in silence watching the water, and talked about things that didn’t matter alongside things that did. He held my hand as if he might lose something if he let go.
I kept reminding myself it was temporary. Not as a warning — more like a compass setting. This ends when I go home. That was the agreement I’d made with myself, and I believed in it, because the alternative was a kind of hope I wasn’t willing to carry back to my real life.
