Mirna held her sister's new coffee machine while Boris explained to his brother in law that he had never wanted children. He said it casually, like an established fact. Mirna nearly dropped the lid. For five years she had heard that they needed a little more stability: first his permanent job, then a larger apartment, then the final car payment. She had not believed a child was promised. She believed they were having an honest conversation about a possibility they both still wanted.
She did not speak immediately in the car. Boris repeated that he had expressed himself badly. She asked what the precise version would sound like. They drove several streets in silence, then he parked. He said he did not want to be a father and had known that for a long time. He feared she would leave if she heard a final answer. So he had participated in conversations about names, calculations of apartment space, and the word later, which she understood as time and he as an escape.
Mirna wanted to shout that he had stolen years, but did not say a sentence she would struggle to explain precisely afterward. She knew nobody could promise the future or guarantee parenthood. He could, however, tell the truth about his own wishes. She said his answer was not wrong. What was wrong was allowing her to make decisions using information he knew was false. Boris cried with both hands on the steering wheel of the parked car.
Over the following weeks they tried to talk without persuasion. Mirna did not want a child with someone who would agree only to keep her, and Boris did not want to promise a change he did not feel. They loved the same films, cooked together, and still laughed at the same foolish things. That made separation slower, not less necessary. Friends offered easy conclusions about who would change their mind. Both stopped arguing with people who turned someone else's life into a bet.
When Mirna moved, she left the shelf they had assembled together because her new room had no space. Boris helped carry the last box and did not ask her to stay another year. She did not know whether she would ever become a mother and did not try to replace that uncertainty with a hurried new relationship. Above her desk she hung a calendar. For the first time in a long while, she did not mark someone else's promise for next summer. She entered her own vacation and called her sister to arrange where they would travel together.