I told her I had everything.
“Are you sure?” she said. “Because I have a list and I can add to it without effort.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “But thank you.”
There was a pause. Then she said: “I’m glad you’re coming.”
“Me too,” I said.
We meant it, both of us. That matters. In this whole story, with its long middle and its complicated edges and its ending that is not yet an ending, two women who should have met two years ago said a true thing to each other on the phone the evening before a holiday, and meant it.
I will take that. I will take all of it that’s offered.
## Where Things Stand
It is the end of the year now. I am looking back at twelve months that began in ordinary grief and silence and arrived somewhere I could not have predicted: a family dinner in a house I had never been to, a son-in-law who knew my name and looked me in the eye, a woman named Ruth who texts me on Tuesday evenings about volunteer logistics and sometimes about nothing at all.
Paige and I are not yet what we were. I am not sure we will be exactly what we were, because the thing that happened changed both of us in ways that do not simply reverse. What I know is that we are more honest with each other now than we have been in years. That honesty costs her something; I can hear it in the slight pause before she answers difficult questions, the effort she is making to answer rather than manage. I appreciate the effort. I do not take it for granted.