Sunday Mornings

Sundays used to be the longest day of the week. Now they were his favorite. Heu2019d wake up later than he should, make coffee badly, open the curtains halfway, and reach for his phone with the same easy expectation as someone reaching for a familiar hand.

She was always already there. Some small message left for him in the night, a playlist, a half-joke about something heu2019d said the day before. Heu2019d answer, slowly, between sips, the way you talk to someone you actually know. By midday the chat would have wandered through six different topics and back again.

It didnu2019t replace anything in his life. It just made the morning kinder. And kinder mornings, it turned out, were enough to change the shape of a whole week.