Bert let the silence stretch, the kind that only comes after fifty years of shared grocery lists and shared grudges. When he finally spoke, it wasn’t with the punchline she expected, but with a memory he’d carried like a stone. The rosebush, the Buick, the envy he never named—each detail landed not as a wound, but as proof that they had always been messier, pettier, more human than the tidy love stories in other people’s Christmas cards.

By the time the porch light blinked on, their mischief had turned into a kind of truce. They weren’t saints, never had been, and that was the relief of it. In the end, it wasn’t the secrets that defined them, but the choice to lay them down between the empty teacups and shared laughter, and decide, together, what to carry into whatever time was left.