He would argue at first. She hadn’t given him enough time to really be alone. She justified it by telling herself that he already knew how to be alone. She’d needed that time to herself because she had never just been herself.

She had always been them or us or we.

Now she was just nervous.

This was all she cared about now. The planning, the preparation, the execution…none of it mattered if he simply said no.

Or, “I can’t”.

In just a few hours, she would give him the one thing he had never given her.

A second chance.