The Weight of Maybe

We hired a handyman.
He was kind.
Respectful.
Had been with the company five years.

After he left,
my wife noticed some jewelry was missing.

Her heart sank.
She thought maybe he took it.

I felt it too.
That flicker of suspicion.
That tension between trust and accusation.

And yet
I also remembered how polite he was.
How carefully he worked.
How much of the story we don’t know.

Maybe it was stolen.
Maybe it was misplaced.
Maybe we’ll never know.

But here’s what I do know:

Jumping to judgment closes the heart.
Holding space for possibility keeps it open.

Empathy doesn’t mean being naive.
It means remembering that people are more than a moment.

That sometimes, even with strong feelings,
we can choose stillness over certainty.