That’s the story. It’s not very dramatic. It’s also, I think, the real one.
## Planning for Spring
We started, tentatively, planning the spring trip. Not booking — not yet. Just talking about it, the way we’d talked about it in January, before everything went sideways.
The conversation had a different quality. In January, the planning had felt simple and anticipatory; we’d been building something we both wanted. Now it felt more careful, like two people testing whether they still knew how to make a plan together without something going wrong.
“The same inn?” Nathan asked. We were sitting in the living room on a Sunday afternoon, the kind of grey November day that turns staying inside into the obvious choice.
“I think so,” I said. “Unless you want somewhere different.”
“No, I’d like to go to the same place.” He paused. “I’d like to actually see it.”
There was something in that — the acknowledgment that he’d been there without me being something incomplete rather than a trip taken — that I noted without comment.
“The cliff walk,” I said. “I’d still like to do the cliff walk.”
“All four miles.”
“Yes.”
“Done,” he said.
We talked about the room. The same sea-view room was probably bookable; it was early enough in the calendar that availability shouldn’t be an issue. We talked about the drive, whether we’d want to stop somewhere on the way. I mentioned a market town I’d looked up, about an hour from the inn, that had a Saturday market. He said that sounded good.