One afternoon, he caught up to me in the parking garage after a shift.

“Hey,” he said. “I don’t know if this is inappropriate given that we work together, but I’ve been trying to find a good time to say this, and I keep talking myself out of it, so…”

He stopped and looked at me directly.

“Would you want to have dinner sometime?”

I studied him for a moment. He held the eye contact without flinching or overselling it.

“I just got out of something pretty significant,” I said.

“I know,” Nah told me. “We went to med school together. She warned me you might say that.”

I almost laughed.

“She sent you?”

“She suggested I might want to meet you. The rest is my own initiative.”

He said it plainly. No performance in it.

“I’m not in a place to promise anything,” I said.

“I’m not asking for a promise,” he said. “Just dinner.”

We had dinner. Then another.

It was slow and unspectacular in the best possible sense. He was not trying to rescue me or fix me or fill any particular role in a story he had written for himself.

He just showed up consistently and paid attention and told me the truth about himself in installments the way adults do when they are being careful about something they actually value.

I did not rush it. I did not need to.

A year after the divorce was finalized, I closed on a condo in the M Streets neighborhood. Two bedrooms, original hardwood floors, a kitchen with enough counter space to actually cook in.

I bought it alone, in my name only, with a down payment I had set aside specifically for this.

I painted the living room a shade of green that Daniel would have hated. I bought a second plant for the kitchen window sill to keep the first one company.

The day I got the keys, Nah came over with a bottle of champagne and we sat on the floor of the empty living room because I didn’t have furniture yet and toasted to whatever came next.

“You know what I keep thinking about?” I said.

“What?”

“How long I made excuses for things that were wrong. Not even dramatic things, small things. The way he never asked about my patients. The way he changed the subject when I talked about the graduate program. The way he managed all the money without ever sitting down and actually showing me where it was going.”

I looked at the walls of my empty living room.

“I kept telling myself it didn’t matter. I kept thinking I was being too sensitive.”

“You weren’t too sensitive,” Nah said.

“I know that now.”

She refilled my glass. “For what it’s worth, you handled it better than I did.”

“You handled it fine.”

“I threw a lamp,” she said.

“The lamp was warranted.”

We stayed until midnight, eating takeout on the floor and talking the way we had in college, following thoughts wherever they went without worrying about where they landed.

When she left, I sat alone in my empty living room for a while, listening to the neighborhood settle into nighttime.

Somewhere down the block, a dog was barking. A car passed. The refrigerator hummed.

It was mine. Completely, legally, unambiguously mine.

I thought about the woman at gate C12 performing her grief for an audience of one, while the man she was watching walk away had already stopped thinking of her as a person and started thinking of her as an account balance.

I thought about how long she had been so careful to be what everyone needed her to be that she had almost forgotten to notice what she needed herself.

That woman was still me, but she was also not me anymore.

Eight months into things with James, on a Saturday afternoon in November, we were cooking in my kitchen, his kitchen now, too, on the weekends.

And he put down the spoon he was using and turned around and said, “I’ve been thinking about something.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I want to ask you something serious, and I want you to know there is no pressure attached to it in any direction.”

“James.”

“I want to marry you,” he said. “I’ve wanted to say that for about 4 months, and I’ve been waiting for the right time, and I’ve realized the right time is just whenever I say it. So, I want to marry you. Not urgently. When you’re ready, if you ever are.”

I looked at him in my green living room next to my two plants and the photograph Nah had taken of us hiking in the Witchita Mountains last spring.

“I’m going to need you to understand something first,” I said.

“Tell me.”

“I will never put all my money in a joint account again. I will always have my own finances, my own accounts, my own professional life. I will never make myself financially dependent on anyone, including you. That’s not negotiable.”

“That’s not even something I would ask for,” he said, looking genuinely confused that it needed to be said.

“I know,” I said. “I’m saying it anyway, because I said too many things to myself quietly before, and I would rather say them out loud this time.”

He nodded slowly. “Okay. Anything else?”

“We talk about money transparently. Everything on the table, no surprises.”

“Agreed.”

“And I pick the paint colors.”

He looked at the green wall and then back at me. “That I might negotiate on.”