“They were okay,” I said. “They missed both of you. They were confused sometimes. But they were kids about it — they’re adaptable in the way that kids are when the adults around them are trying to do right by them. I think you both doing right by them was what allowed it to go as smoothly as it did.”
Brooke went quiet for a moment. “Thank you for that,” she said.
She told me she had found a stable apartment — a year lease, starting in three weeks. She was working out the specifics of her schedule with Owen, how the alternating weeks would work long-term, and they were talking with a mediator to make sure the arrangement was actually sustainable rather than cobbled together under pressure.
“That’s the right thing to do,” I said.
“I know it’s late,” she said. “We should have done it sooner.”
She wasn’t wrong. But I didn’t need her to feel worse about it than she already did.
## The Reimbursement Agreement
Owen and I settled on a number: he’d pay back a thousand dollars over five months, two hundred a month, which wasn’t the full gap but was meaningful. It wasn’t a court order, it wasn’t an invoice, it was an agreement between two adults who had worked out what was fair and wrote it down.
He set up a recurring transfer. The first one arrived on time.
I’m noting this not because the money was the point, but because follow-through is how you know someone understood the conversation you had. The agreement was a small thing. Its arrival, on time, two hundred dollars in my account on the fifth of the month, said something about whether the Wednesday coffee meeting had actually registered.