Georgia
The last good day arrived without either of them knowing it was the last.
They drove, finally, to the coast, the trip they had talked about over breakfast on the morning of her worst day. She was weak enough by then that he had to help her from the car to a bench overlooking the water, and the outing took most of what strength she had left, and she did not care at all, because the water was exactly the blue she remembered, and Axel’s hand was warm around hers, and for an hour neither of them thought about anything else.
At some point Axel asked her, apropos of nothing, whether she’d ever finished fourteen across. She hadn’t. She never would, and they both understood that without either of them saying it, and instead of letting it land as tragedy she said, “Give me a letter,” and made him recite the clue from a memory neither of them entirely trusted, and they spent ten minutes arguing cheerfully and almost certainly incorrectly about a six-letter word for regret, until the arguing itself, and not the answer, became the point of it.
“I always thought I’d be someone’s grandmother by now,” she said, watching a young family further down the beach, a small boy chasing gulls. “I don’t know why I’m thinking about that today.”
Axel didn’t try to fix it or console her out of it. He held her hand tighter and let it sit there beside them on the bench.
“I would have liked that,” she said. “Being somebody’s grandmother. Complaining about my knees. All of it.”
“I know.”
“I’m not sorry about the twenty years, Axel. I want you to know that. I’m not sorry I married Benjamin, even now, even knowing everything. Because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have learned what I needed to learn to actually see you, that first night at the bar, instead of walking right past you the way I might have at twenty-five, when I still thought I knew exactly what my life was supposed to look like.”
“I’m not sorry either,” he said. “About any of it. Not the parts that hurt. I’d take all of it again, exactly like this, if the only other option was never having had you at all.”
They sat until the light went gold, and then rose, and then began to fade. Georgia thought of all the sunsets she had once assumed were owed to her, decades of them, and that this one had never been owed to anyone.
There was a private list she kept now, not of numbers: things she would not get to do. She would not see the dogwood grow past its first thin, uncertain branches into the shape it would eventually settle into. She would not know, one way or another, whether Axel eventually let himself love someone else, or spent the rest of his life alone, and she found, turning the thought over, that she genuinely didn’t know which she would have preferred, only that she wouldn’t be there to have an opinion. She would not become the old woman she had only just started wanting to be: the one who complained about her knees, who argued with him over the same movie for the thirtieth time, who woke up bored on an unremarkable Wednesday and considered it, correctly, a gift.
She did not tell Axel the list.
That evening they didn’t do anything remarkable. She was too tired even for the overlook down the street, so they sat on the back porch, within sight of the dogwood, and Axel read a few pages of the unfinished book aloud because her eyes had started tiring faster than the rest of her, and somewhere in the middle of a sentence about a woman crossing an ocean alone, Georgia fell asleep in her chair with her hand still resting in his. Axel let her sleep. Nothing about the evening was different from any other quiet evening they’d had that month.