Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc

The first rule of grief, she had decided, was that everyone in your life eventually ran out of things to say.

It was month seven. Her husband had been gone for seven months, and the casseroles had stopped coming, and her friends called less, not because they didn’t care but because they didn’t know how to sit with her in it anymore, and she understood — she had been that person before, on the other side of someone else’s loss, not knowing what to say — but understanding it didn’t make the silence smaller.

She started walking at night because she couldn’t sleep.

He was always out at the same hour — a man with a dog and the insomniac energy of someone also not doing well. They nodded for three weeks. Said nothing. The dog had opinions about her boots.

One night he was sitting on the bench by the river and the dog had made a decision and she was standing there with the lead tangled around her legs.

“Sit down,” he said. “She’ll untangle herself when she’s ready.”

She sat. The dog did not immediately untangle herself.

“You’re out here every night,” he said. Not an accusation. Just an observation.

“So are you.”

“My wife died fourteen months ago,” he said. “You?”

She looked at him. Seven months, she said. He nodded. He didn’t say it gets easier or time heals or at least you had the years you had, which were things people said when they hadn’t done it themselves.

He just said: “The nights are the worst part.”

“Yes,” she said.

They sat in the dark by the water and the dog finally untangled herself and lay across both their feet like she’d planned it.

She didn’t fall in love with him quickly. That felt important to say. It took months of winter nights and one full spring and a summer where they started walking together on purpose. It took his hands on hers one night when she cried without warning, and his particular understanding of grief — not trying to fix it, just sitting in it alongside her.

It took her realising that the nights had stopped being the worst part.

“I feel guilty,” she told him once, when they’d become something she didn’t have a word for yet. “For being happy. Even a little.”

“I know,” he said. “I felt it too.” He looked at her. “I think they’d both be — I think they’d be relieved for us, actually.”

She leaned into him on the bench by the river.

The dog put her head in her lap.

It wasn’t the life she’d planned. It was the one that arrived, and she held it carefully, and it was — she let herself say it — good.

So you made it to the end… which probably means you’re the kind of person who enjoys a little romance with their coffee ☕. If you’re in the mood for more stories about messy feelings, stubborn attraction, and women who absolutely refuse to settle for boring love, you can find all my books here.

Fair warning though. One story tends to lead to another. I’ve seen it happen. Repeatedly.