some have dreams; some have nightmares, and some have neither.
She met him at the wedding.
He had long, black, shaggy hair, and beautiful emerald robes that went down past his ankles and matched with hers, and rounded glasses taped at the brim just like his brat's. He had a voice that filled up the room with its scaffolds and confetti and twirling vines with tearful proclamations of joy, and such else: there was little else to say. He looked at her, and nodded, curtly, perhaps, in her direction, and she stood there in her ugly lime green dress in her ugly red lipstick thinking that he was someone she remembers. She met him that day and she says to the boy otherwise but that isn't true: she met her sister's husband on their wedding day, and she sat in the back and wished so desperately that he wouldn't be so handsome.
And then the boy appeared on her doorstep with the letter in tow, and she knew as soon as she touched it -- her fingers spreading around the edges of the thick stationary with the looping handwriting -- that that was the end of the beginning.
"But Petunia," he says now, and blinks in her direction with those slim silver glasses and his arms plastered to his sides with an air of formality. "Aren't you well?"
"No," she says honestly, and squints at him, her breaths coming shallowly and painfully: she cannot feel the ground beneath her feet. "No," she says again, and touches her knee with curled scarlet fingernails. "No."
"She forgave you," he says.
"I don't believe you."
"She forgave you the moment you opened the door and found him on your doorstep and took him for fifteen years. She forgives you as we speak. She forgives you every morning and every night and every day." He looks at her helplessly, and his shoulders give a little shrug that she recognizes is meant to be comforting but is not. "She is loving you as we speak, and she will never stop."
"Well, then," she says. "She will never be satisfied."
"But you love him," he says, "and that is all we need."
And then he is gone, and she wakes up.