Margaret came in a few minutes later and poured herself a cup from the same pot, and we sat together at that table in comfortable silence for a while, two sisters who had grown up sharing rooms and now, it seemed, would spend a while sharing this particular chapter too. Outside the window, the maple in the front yard had started to turn early that year, the first edges of its leaves going the deep orange red they always went right before the rest of the tree caught up.
I looked at that tree for a long moment, and then at my sister, and then down at my own hands wrapped around a warm mug in a kitchen that belonged, unmistakably and entirely, to me alone. Whatever came next, the divorce filings, the eventual quiet of an empty house not shared with anyone else’s shirts or shoes or unexplained perfume, I understood I would be meeting it from solid ground rather than from the shaky, uncertain place I had been standing on for longer than I’d let myself admit.
