Tess said it out loud

Tess said the thing nobody has said. She said: what if you just moved back. I started on the reasons immediately. Danny's whole book of work is here, his reputation is local and it took six years to build, the house we have just put a roof fund into, my licence, my caseload, four years of referral relationships that do not transfer across a state line. And she said: yes, and his trade exists in Massachusetts. And I did not have a second argument. That was genuinely unsettling. I have been treating moving home as categorically impossible since about May — not weighed and rejected, impossible, a thing that is not on the table — and when somebody put it on the table I had one objection and it turned out to be about reputation rather than possibility. The licence thing is real but it is paperwork and a wait. The caseload is real and is also a thing I rebuilt once already when we moved here. I have been carrying "we cannot" when the honest sentence is "it would be hard and neither of us has said it out loud". She let me sit there with it and then asked about the roof, which she did not care about, which was kind.

His, I assume. Except he has never made it. I have never once asked him what he thinks about leaving Asheville. I have been arguing his case for him for six months, against myself, in my own head, and losing.