The paperwork was filed. The decision was made. The women who would come after her, women who had spent their lives giving and had arrived at the end of that giving with very little to show for it, would have somewhere to come to. She thought about that and found that it satisfied her in a way that the original plan had never quite managed to.
This house had been built by giving. It would keep giving.
She turned off the kitchen light and went to sit on the porch, in her proper chair, in the salt air, with the waves making their old faithful sound in the dark. A few minutes later she heard the screen door and Robert came out and sat on the steps the way he used to, his legs folded, his hands around his mug, looking out at the water.
They did not speak for a long while.
The ocean did the speaking.
And after a time, Eleanor felt the last of the evening’s tension leave her shoulders. It left her slowly, the way cold leaves a room when the windows are finally opened. She felt the chair beneath her, solid and familiar. She felt the air. She felt the house at her back, hers in every board and stitch and creak.
Robert said, eventually, that it was good out here.
Eleanor said yes.
It was. It had always been.
