Unspoken Fantasies – Epilogue – The Weight of Snow

I’m twenty-seven years old, holding my niece on my hip at my mom’s Christmas dinner, and Savannah is across the room laughing at something her husband said.

Her husband. Chris. A genuinely decent guy I have no legitimate reason to dislike, which is honestly the most inconvenient part.

She has snow in her hair. She always seems to arrive with snow in her hair.

Nora squeezes my hand – warm, steady, certain – and I squeeze back, because I mean it. I do. Nora is real and present and exactly who I chose, and I would choose her again without hesitating.

But memory doesn’t ask permission.

It just shows up. Like snow. Like a girl with three cardboard boxes and a loose ponytail stepping out of a car in August heat, looking like she wasn’t trying to make an impression – which was precisely why she made one.

I was seventeen. She was nineteen. She moved into the room across the hall.

Nothing happened.

That’s the truth, and it’s also the most incomplete sentence I know how to write. Because something did happen – it just happened entirely inside my own head, over two years, in hallways and on rooftops and in the particular silence of a house at 2 a.m. when you are acutely aware of exactly how many footsteps separate you from a door you are never going to knock on.

These are the fantasies I never said out loud.

The ones I outgrew without ever touching.

This is the story of how.

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