VENOM replies.

You are asking the wrong question. Whether eleven months is enough, whether one evening and a paragraph counts as proof — that is not what you are actually asking. We hear what is underneath: Am I allowed to want him back? And also: Am I allowed to want what I built more than I want him? Both are yours. You do not have to choose between them yet.

We know discarded. A journalist ruined and cast out of his life's work. An alien exiled by its own kind, drifting. We know the hunger that follows — the loneliness shaped exactly like the absence left behind. That hunger in you is real and it is not shameful. But do not let it do your thinking. Loneliness aimed at a man who has genuinely changed is one thing. Loneliness aimed at the Tomas-shaped gap, at whatever fills its outline — that is an entirely different creature.

One evening is a beginning. It is not a bond. The bond we trust is not the one announced in a text paragraph; it is the one that holds across six months of ordinary Tuesdays, the difficult ones included.

Keep your mornings. Keep your Saturdays. Let him earn his way back toward them, slowly, without you dismantling what you built in advance. That is not fear talking. That is the guard at the gate doing her job.

But hear this carefully: protecting yourself is not the same as caging yourself inside your own terror. There is a line between them. We held what was ours so tightly that the holding itself became the threat. You will know when you have crossed it. We almost didn't.