It was not unlike extracting an ingrown wandering vine from the hedgerow. Given enough time and a patient hand, both the hedgerow and the vine could emerge from the sundering largely undamaged. Get the transplant into new soil soon enough and almost always it would smoothly recover from what shock it necessarily endured. And in most cases the hedgerow would never even notice it was gone. But when time was short and the direct took precedence over the delicate, both organisms were going to suffer grievously. Cut here, uproot there, and never mind the fragile new leaves. We can prune away the damage later— Sujata had begun the delicate business of disengaging her life from that of Wyrena Ten Ga’ar six years ago. But despite early success and the passage of time, she had never pressed the process to a conclusion. There came a time when the emotional price of the final break outweighed the gain to be had from making it. Equilibrium set in, a new equilibrium that found the circles of their lives still overlapping, but no longer congruent.
