She was a terrible driver, and she knew it.
Not dangerous exactly — she’d never had an accident, technically — but aggressive in a way that suggested a loose interpretation of lane boundaries, and possessed of a confidence in her own spatial awareness that her spatial awareness consistently failed to justify.
He never commented. This, she’d come to understand, was an active choice on his part, not an absence of opinion.
“You grip the handle,” she told him once, having noticed this for years. “Every time. The passenger grip. You do it on roundabouts.”
“That’s just where I like to put my hand,” Matteo said, with the serenity of a man who had decided that some battles were not worth the years of collateral damage.
“You tense.”
“I’m relaxed.”
“Matteo.”
A pause. “I trust you completely,” he said, with the precision of someone choosing his words in the manner of a man navigating a minefield. “The car and I simply have a different relationship.”
She burst out laughing, which was, she suspected, the intended outcome. He knew exactly how to take the edge off something without making her feel criticized. Had always known. It was one of his finest qualities, this ability to have an opinion and express it in a way that made her laugh rather than defend herself.
“You could just say I’m a bad driver.”
“I could. I’m choosing not to.” He unclenched the handle slightly, demonstrably. “We all have gifts.”
Proximity, she thought, doesn’t require the total abandonment of private opinion. Sometimes love is just: knowing which things are worth saying and which are worth gripping the handle for.
✦ Today’s Reflection
What is something about your partner you’ve made a private peace with — not because it doesn’t exist, but because loving them fully means accepting it?
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