She hadn't started counting right away, of course. Not until a year had passed did it occur to her that it had been 365 days since that night. The next day, she woke up and said, "It's been 366 days." The next day, she didn't think of it until lunchtime, so she didn't say it out loud, but she knew it had been 367 days. From then on, she kept a tally.

So now, half of a thousand days had gone by. A lot had happened in that time. She'd gotten her own apartment. A fancy one, according to some. She'd gone on dates. She'd taken art classes. She'd spent time with friends she thought she'd lost, and made new friends she never would have suspected. She bought a red blouse. In some ways, the time seemed to have flown by.

In the ways that mattered, it had crept along. For five hundred days she'd known what it was like to not have him as her best friend. For nearly a year and a half she'd been haunted by a regret she could barely make herself name. For some of that time he'd been away, and for some of it he'd been back, but the distance between them was almost as great either way. A smile made it better; a joke almost made her forget. Always, though, the space, and the growing pile of days, lurked behind his eyes and under his laughter and inside his smile.

She looked at the notepad, with the dashes and slashmarks marking the time since he'd taken his risk. Five hundred days were enough. It was time for her to take hers.