He Chose Her Over Me So I Chose Myself Chapter 36
The theme for the library’s stained-glass competition was *Home*.
I sat at my workbench for three days without making a single cut.
My old home had been a very large house.
My photographs hung on the foundation’s publicity wall. My name was printed on every family dinner invitation. And yet no cake was ever made in my favorite flavor, and no room was ever truly kept for me.
Eli didn’t offer advice.
On the fourth day, he set a cup of hot tea by my elbow as usual.
“Drawing today?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then don’t, for now.”
He sat by the window and read, as if whether I entered the competition or not would not change the way he saw me.
At dusk, his brother came in holding a box of glass scraps.
He picked out the cobalt blue pane, then found amber and rose red, lining them up in a gentle curve along the windowsill.
The setting sun shone through them, and all three colors fell together on the same patch of floor.
He crouched there and stared for a long time.
“They’re all here.”
Suddenly, I picked up a pencil.
The new sketch had no grand dome.
It was made of many pieces of glass in different shapes, each keeping its own edges while being joined firmly together with lead came. At the center was not the Mercer crest, nor anyone’s surname, but an open door.