Chapter One

There is a particular kind of silence that lives between two people who love each other — not the silence of absence, but of presence so full it has no need of words. I have lived inside that silence with you, have pressed my ear against it the way one presses a shell to hear the ocean, and found it warmer than I ever thought a quiet could be.

I have tried, on countless evenings, to write down what you mean to me. The pen would move, then stop, as if the ink itself were too ordinary a thing to carry such weight. You are not ordinary. You are the kind of rare that rearranges the furniture of a person's soul — that makes old rooms feel new, that turns every ordinary Tuesday into something worth remembering.

I have loved you in the small hours, in the minutes between sleeping and waking when the world has not yet remembered its own name. I have loved you in the noise and in the stillness, in the seasons that changed outside our window while something between us stayed quietly, stubbornly the same. It is that constancy I return to, again and again, like a reader who dog-ears a favourite page.

If I am honest — and I am trying very hard to be — I did not know I was capable of a love this deliberate. Not the falling kind, which relies on accident and gravity, but the choosing kind, which wakes each morning and says: yes, still, again. You have made me a person who chooses. I am grateful for that more than I know how to say.

So here is what I will say instead: I am yours, in all the ways that matter and several that do not. I am yours in the grand gestures and in the forgetting to buy milk. In the arguments we talk through and the apologies that come too late and are given anyway. In every imperfect, luminous, ordinary day — I am yours. And I always will be.