Chapter 23
“I’ve been telling people that for years.”
She told me everything.
New responsibilities.
Better pay.
A team of three.
When she finished, I realized something.
Not once had she sounded afraid.
Six months earlier, every decision seemed to come tangled in somebody else’s opinion.
Now she sounded like herself.
Not the version of herself I remembered from childhood.
A new one.
A woman I was learning to know.
“How’s Dustin?” I asked.
“Coming next weekend.”
“You two doing okay?”
A pause.
“We’re trying.”
Not perfect.
Not forever.
Trying.
I respected that answer.
Spring came.
Then summer.
The gym changed too.
Eddie bought out the remaining ownership interest and renamed the business Harbor Street Athletics.
He added youth fitness classes, women’s self-defense workshops, and physical therapy sessions led twice a month by his brother Michael, whose clinic had finally opened.
The first time I walked in after the remodel, Eddie pointed toward the cage.
“You owe me a demonstration.”
“I’m retired.”
“You said that twenty years ago.”
“I’m more retired now.”
Dustin emerged from the locker room.
“He’s scared.”
I looked at him.
“You want to test that theory?”
He smiled.
Six months earlier, that sentence would have meant something different between us.
Now it was a joke.
Mostly.
Marcy flew home for the gym’s reopening.
The moment she entered, Dustin saw her.
His face changed in the way faces do when emotion arrives before people have time to arrange it.
He crossed the room.
Then stopped a few feet away.
For the briefest moment, I saw uncertainty between them.
Months apart had changed both.
That was unavoidable.
Then Marcy smiled.
Dustin smiled back.
They hugged.
Nothing cinematic.
Nothing promised.
Just two people choosing, for the moment, to keep learning each other.
Linda slipped her arm through mine.
“You watching?”
“I have eyes.”
“You’re hovering.”
“I’m standing.”
“You hover while standing.”
“I don’t think that’s physically possible.”
She smiled.
We watched Marcy talk with Eddie.
Claire arrived later.
Michael brought too much food.
Even Raymond Reed appeared briefly.
He and Dustin spoke in a quiet corner.
They shook hands.
No embrace.
May you like
Some relationships healed in inches.
That counted too.
