It was just 2 cups instead of 1.
It was a small thing, the smallest thing.
It was everything.
Outside, the city was already awake, loud and bright and rushing forward the way it always did: market sellers setting up their tables, schoolchildren in their uniforms, buses filling and emptying and filling again, the ordinary world doing its ordinary things.
But inside the big white villa on the palm-tree-lined street, something had changed.
The house that had been too large for 1 person for 30 years was beginning, slowly, to fit 2.
The silence that had once been the silence of absence was becoming, 1 breakfast at a time, 1 careful conversation at a time, 1 small and tentative step at a time, the silence of something that had been lost and was now, with great patience and no small amount of courage on both sides, being found.
It would not be easy. It would not be fast. Healing never is.
But it had begun.
And sometimes, in a story that has been waiting 30 years for its last chapter, beginning is enough.
