So when he booked a nice restaurant for our tenth anniversary, a real restaurant, the kind we usually only went to for other people’s celebrations, I let myself hope. I couldn’t help it. Ten years is a milestone even by David’s careful logic, and something about the effort of it, the reservation made in advance, the mention that I should wear something nice, made a small stubborn part of me start to build a picture I knew better than to build. I didn’t say any of this out loud. I didn’t tell my sister, didn’t let myself write it down anywhere it could be found and mocked later. But I got dressed that evening with my hands not quite steady, and I looked at myself in the mirror, and I let the hope live in my chest for one night, quiet and warm, like something I was cupping in my hands to keep it from blowing out.
I want to be honest about how much I let myself imagine, because the size of the hope is part of the shape of what came after. Standing in front of the mirror in the dress I had chosen carefully, doing my earrings, I let a whole small film run in my head. I pictured him waiting until dessert. I pictured some clumsy, endearing speech, because David was never good at sincerity and I found his awkwardness with it touching. I pictured the moment when I would finally get to call my sister and hear her shriek down the phone, and the moment I would get to stop performing that managed silence at other people’s weddings because I would have a wedding of my own to talk about. I even, God help me, thought about which of my grandmother’s things I might wear. I stood in front of that mirror and let myself want it fully, without hedging, for the first time in years, and I told myself that ten years had earned me the right to want it out loud. Then I turned off the bathroom light and went downstairs to where David was waiting by the door, checking his phone, and I told myself to be calm, and I got in the car.
