“I have a new secret,” she said.
Josh laughed, the sound easy now in a way it hadn’t been in a long time. “Are you going to tell your mom this time?”
Adeline grinned, missing one front tooth, and nodded. “I already told her. It’s not a secret from her. It’s a secret I’m telling everybody.” She pointed at the two of us, then folded her small arms with great satisfaction. “You’re gonna get married. I already decided.”
Josh looked at me across the table, color rising in his face the exact same way it had the day this all began, and for once, he didn’t look away.
“Some promises,” he said, reaching for my hand under the purple-circled calendar hanging behind him, “take longer to keep than others. But I intend to.”
I didn’t know yet exactly how our story would end. I only knew that the little girl who once refused to tell me a secret had grown into a healthy, laughing seven-year-old with her whole life circled in purple ahead of her, and that the man who had once walked away from me down a hospital hallway now sat close enough that I could feel him breathing beside me, steady, the way he’d always been.
Some promises are made in a whisper, in a hospital room, by people too afraid of hoping out loud. This one, we kept.
