THE CHRISTMAS INVITATION WAS JUST THE BEGINNING—MARGARET HAD ALREADY DECIDED WHAT SHE WOULD DO

Walter arrived on the second Saturday of February, carrying a single suitcase and a bouquet of white ranunculus that Margaret recognized, with quiet surprise, as her favorite flower — mentioned once, in passing, during a dinner in Charleston, months of small kindness ago.

"You remembered," she said, accepting the flowers at her front door.

"I remember most things people tell me," Walter said. "It's one of the few advantages of getting old. Everything moves slower, so there's more room to actually notice."

She gave him the guest room — freshly painted in sage green, the color she'd chosen for herself and found, to her quiet delight, suited a visitor perfectly as well.

Over the following days, they fell into an easy rhythm that surprised Margaret with how uncomplicated it felt. Long walks in the mild February air. Dinners that took hours because neither of them was in any hurry to end the conversation. Quiet mornings on her back porch, coffee in hand, watching the light change over her own garden.

"Your family seems complicated," Walter observed on the third evening, after Margaret had told him, carefully, about the in-law suite proposal and everything that had followed.

"They are," Margaret agreed. "I think most families are, once you look closely enough."

"Do you regret it? Setting the boundary?"

Margaret considered the question seriously, the way she considered most things now.

"No," she said finally. "I regret that it took me five years to start. But I don't regret starting. Even the hard parts — even watching Tiffany cry at my kitchen table twice in two months — feel more honest than the version of our relationship where I just kept saying yes and resenting everyone quietly."

"That's the thing about honesty," Walter said. "It's rarely comfortable in the moment. It's only comfortable in retrospect, once you can see what it built."

On his last evening before flying back to Atlanta, they sat together on Margaret's porch, the February air carrying the first hints of the milder spring to come.

"I don't want this to be complicated," Walter said carefully. "I'm sixty-six years old, Margaret. I've buried a wife I loved for thirty-eight years. I'm not interested in games, or rushing, or pretending I don't know what I feel."

Margaret waited, her heart beating a little faster than she wanted to admit.

"I'd like to keep visiting," Walter said. "As often as you'll have me. And I'd like, eventually, to see where this goes, without either of us assuming anything about what the other one needs. Just asking. The way you've been teaching your whole family to do this year."

Margaret laughed softly, surprised and moved in equal measure.

"I'd like that very much," she said. "As long as we both keep asking. Every time. Even when it would be easier to assume."

"Every time," Walter agreed, and reached for her hand — not as a demand, not as an assumption, but as a simple, gentle question, waiting to see if she would answer it by reaching back.