The fire crackled in the hearth, throwing warm flickers across the wooden walls of the little mountain cabin. Outside, snow drifted down softly, wrapping the world in a muted hush.
Sophie and David sat in silence before the flames, both still digesting the conversation they had just had. He was still turning over in his mind what he truly wanted, how much marriage really mattered to him. She waited, half-afraid he would press the issue, that she would be forced to yield.
David's mind clung to its old patterns, the order he had always believed was right. He turned to her, his eyes glinting in the firelight, and in his voice came a new note—uncertainty laced with insistence.
"Sweetheart," he began, his fingers tightening slightly around her hand, "what about children? Do you want children?"
She shook her head slowly, answering without hesitation.
"No. Do you?"
David realized, with a jolt, that he didn't know. Children? He had never truly thought about it. His world had been simple: people meet, fall in love, marry, have children. Wasn't that happiness? Wasn't that the path he had always assumed was the only right one? Yet now, looking into her eyes, he felt that pattern splintering—just like everything else in his life since Sophie had entered it.
He frowned.
"I… I don't know," he murmured, unsettled. "I always thought it was… just a given. That it's part of life. But if I'm honest…" His voice trailed off, his gaze dropping to the floor as if searching for answers in the dancing shadows of the fire.
Sophie stroked his hand and kissed his neck gently.
"David," she said softly, but with a pull in her voice that drew him like a magnet, "you're hiding again behind what's 'supposed to be.' Forget 'I always thought.' Look inside yourself. Listen to yourself. What do you— the real you—want?" She paused, her eyes bright. "Be completely honest. Not with me. With yourself."
"You know… I was married once…"
"I know," she said calmly.
"How?" he asked, startled.
"I'm obsessed with you. Did you forget?" she replied with a sly smile, watching how the reminder pleased him.
Flustered, Miller went on.
"And in five years of marriage we never decided to have children."
"Maybe because you didn't want to," she suggested.
He nodded. And, very quietly, almost to himself, added:
"Or because she wasn't you…"
He looked at Sophie, feeling her words crack his familiar world again. Children. He pictured them—tiny figures running through a house, laughter, toys on the floor, family dinners. It was the picture he'd seen in films, in colleagues' homes, in dreams that had never really been his. But did he actually want it? He tried to imagine himself as a father, but the image blurred like scenes from someone else's life.
He knew what he loved: Sophie and her wildness, their adventures, science and books, the university's air, his old brown sweater, coffee without milk. But children? There was no such clarity.
"I don't know," he said at last, his voice hoarse, almost a whisper. "I thought I was supposed to want children. That it's… part of love, part of life. But…" He swallowed, his eyes finding hers, confusion in them he had never let show before. "I want you, Sophie. I want our nights, our worlds, our secrets. I want to see you with Bruno and Motya, to watch you laugh when they steal your things. I want to wake up beside you and not know which reality we'll be in tomorrow. That… that's what I want. And children… I'm not sure that's mine to want."
Sophie smiled—satisfied with his answer.
"Then don't," she whispered, kissing the hand that held her shoulder. "We don't need children to be happy. We don't need rings, weddings, or anyone's expectations. We have us. And that…" She stopped, her voice trembling as if she might cry. "That's more than enough. In every reality."
David felt the tension in his chest dissolve. Her words were a key opening a door to what he had always known but feared to admit. He didn't want children—not now, maybe never. And it didn't make their love smaller. It made it freer, purer.
He stroked her hair and, once again, marveled at her: this extraordinary woman—so wise, so free of convention.
"You're right," he whispered, his lips brushing the crown of her head. "We don't need anything but us."