He held it for a long time without saying anything.
I told him I wasn’t coming to relitigate six months. I wasn’t demanding anything. But I wanted him to see what “just the babysitter” was describing, because I thought the phrase said something real about how he’d understood my role.
He looked up from the spreadsheet. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know you didn’t mean it to land the way it did,” I said. “But it’s what you said, and it reflects something. You’ve been calling it babysitting in your head, I think. And babysitting is when someone watches your kids for a few hours. This was something else.”
He was quiet. Owen is not a man who apologizes quickly; he thinks it through and then he does it, which is a character trait I’ve known about him since we were kids.
“You’re right,” he said. “It was a lot more than that. I think I kept calling it babysitting in my head so I could keep telling myself it wasn’t as big as it was.”
That was the honest thing he needed to say. I waited to see if he’d keep going.
“I didn’t manage this well,” he said. “I kept asking for more time because it was easier than figuring out my situation, and I told myself you were fine because you kept saying okay. I should have known you were being my sister, not actually okay.”
This was, for Owen, a significant thing to say. I thanked him for saying it.