The Anniversary

"You always send everyone away on this particular day," Gertrude said, one of the few people who still remembered exactly why. "Every year, the same request. No visitors, no obligations."

"It's one day. I think I've earned it."

"I'm not arguing that you haven't." Gertrude settled into the chair opposite, uninvited but not unwelcome. "I only wondered, this year, whether you'd let me sit with you through part of it, instead of alone."

Diane considered this longer than the request probably warranted, then nodded.

"It doesn't hurt the way it used to," she said, some while later, turning a ring on her finger that had nothing to do with Bussy at all but that she always touched on this particular day regardless. "That's the strange part. Not smaller. Just — worn in, the way a shoe wears in. It doesn't disappear. It stops announcing itself every hour."

"Do you think of him differently now, than you did those first years?"

"Considerably differently. I spent the first years remembering a man who could do no wrong, because grieving anything less than a perfect man felt like a betrayal at the time. I don't do that anymore." Diane looked at the fire rather than at Gertrude. "He was reckless. Genuinely reckless, not just brave — there's a difference I couldn't see clearly until I'd had years to look at it properly. The same recklessness that made him ride to my defense without a second thought for his own safety is exactly what got him killed in that garden. I loved both halves of that man. I've stopped pretending they were two different men."

"Does it trouble you? Loving him more honestly now than you did when the grief was fresh?"

"It did, the first year I noticed I was doing it. I thought honesty about his flaws meant I'd loved him less than I claimed to." Diane shook her head slowly. "I don't think that anymore. I think I love him more completely now, actually — the whole man, reckless and brave in the same breath, rather than the polished version grief needed me to build in those first terrible months just to survive them."

Gertrude said nothing for a while, letting the fire fill the silence. "I've never asked you outright," she said finally. "Do you regret it? Any of it — loving a man that reckless, knowing what it eventually cost you?"

Diane didn't answer immediately. When she did, her voice was steady in a way it hadn't been on earlier anniversaries. "No. I've turned that question over more times than I can count, and the answer's always the same when I'm honest with myself. I'd rather have loved him exactly as he was, recklessness and all, for exactly as long as I got him, than have loved someone safer for twice as many years."