My wife.
The family we had before the highway accident.
I finally understood healing differently.
Some things never return.
Dorothy would not walk through my kitchen door again.
Melissa would never recover every lost memory.
Calvin and Melissa might never become the couple they once were.
Ava could never receive seven missing years with her mother.
But loss did not mean the future had to remain empty.
Sometimes healing meant making room for what was still possible.
January arrived.
For the first time in seven years, I did not wire Calvin forty thousand dollars.
Instead, the four of us went to the bank together.
Ava wore a purple sweater and carried the stuffed rabbit Melissa had remembered from her baby years.
The rabbit still had one bent ear.
We deposited the year’s money into her new account.
Ava watched the teller stamp a receipt.
“Is that my money?”
“For your future,” I said.
