A year had passed.
I didn't mark the day it began. No ceremony. No closure. Just time, moving on like it always does—quiet and unbothered.
But I noticed it in the little things. The way Alex stopped flinching every time Adrien raised his voice. The way Adrien no longer looked at him like a loaded weapon. The way I stopped waking up at night wondering if forgiving was the same thing as forgetting.
We were all… healing. Slowly. Carefully.
Alex had changed. I didn't say that lightly. Change wasn't flowers or apologies or promises. It was showing up, every day, even when it was hard. It was the therapist appointments he never missed. The humility in his voice when he said, "I was wrong." The patience in how he waited—never pushing, never expecting anything from me.
And I saw it, too, in Adrien. In how the boy who once couldn't stand to be in the same room as his father now called him after his basketball games. How they sat in the garage for hours building things, no words needed. Just effort. Quiet understanding.
But me? I was the last to move. The hardest to thaw.
Because even though he was no longer the man who had once torn me apart… the scars still remembered.
And yet, there were moments.
Moments where my heart did that fluttering thing it used to do. When Alex laughed like he used to, eyes soft and messy-haired, I'd catch myself smiling before I could stop it. When he fixed the garden light I'd given up on and whispered, "Still remember what you like," my stomach turned in that awful, familiar, lovely way.
I hated how familiar it all still was.
I hated how safe it started to feel again.
One evening, we were folding laundry—quiet, ordinary. I handed him Adrien's hoodie, and our fingers brushed. He paused.
"I still remember the day I bought this for him," he said. "You were so mad it was too big. Said he'd drown in it."
I laughed. "He grew into it, though. Looks good on him now."
"Yeah," he smiled. "Just like he's growing into… us. This."
I looked at him. Really looked.
He wasn't the boy who broke me.
He was the man I had once believed in. The one I used to love with every ounce of me, before everything twisted. And standing here, in the soft golden light of our kitchen, I didn't see a monster. I saw someone trying, every day, to be better. Not for me. Not for show. But because he couldn't live with the version of himself who used to walk these floors.
I didn't say I loved him. Not yet.
But that night, I didn't flinch when he kissed the top of my head.
And maybe—just maybe—that meant something.