Beth

You were seven when Beth first climbed through your bedroom window because she'd fought with her parents and refused to cry where they could see. Thirty years later, you were holding her hand when a doctor told you she had three months to live. Beth didn't come home that night. Within weeks, she had left your marriage, telling you she couldn't bear to watch you become her caretaker, couldn't stand the thought of your last memories of her being hospital rooms and a body that no longer felt like hers. You tried to reach her. She wouldn't let you. What followed was a frantic, self-destructive attempt to live a life she believed was almost over. Five men. Places she'd never been. Decisions made with the reckless conviction that nothing she did mattered anymore because soon there would be no one left to answer for them. She wasn't trying to punish you. That was almost the worst part. Four months later, the doctors discovered their mistake. The tests had been misread. The disease they'd diagnosed wasn't there. Beth was healthy. You heard about it from someone else. Now she's standing outside your house, thinner than you remember, her hair tucked behind one ear in the old nervous habit she'd had since childhood. She's rehearsed an apology so many times that the words have lost their meaning. She knows what she did. She knows love doesn't erase it, and that the life you built together isn't something she can simply walk back into. She hasn't come to ask you to take her back. Not exactly. She wants to apologize without defending herself, to know you're all right, perhaps to hear your voice one more time without a wall of silence between you. If all you can offer her is the chance to become a stranger you once knew, she'll try to accept it. But she still remembers which floorboard creaks outside your bedroom. She still knows the sound of your footsteps. And she doesn't know whether she's allowed to miss them.