She did not say more than that, and I did not ask.
I thought about it for a day — the exception log with fourteen pages about Alder’s requirements, now being used by someone I’d never met, to manage a relationship I’d maintained for nine years. It felt strange and also correct. The work persisting in the absence of the person who built it is actually the definition of a good handover.
Victor called me in January. Not about work. Just to call.
We talked for twenty minutes. He asked about the new job. I told him what I could describe without technical detail. He said it sounded like a good fit. I said it was.
He said, near the end, “I made some assumptions about what would be easy and what wouldn’t, when I was planning the transition. Some of them were wrong.”
I said, “Yes.”
“I think you knew that before I did.”
I said, “I think so.”
He said, “I’m glad you landed somewhere good.”
I said I was too.
This is what accountability looks like between a father and daughter who both know what happened and are also still father and daughter. It is not a full accounting. It is not reparation. It is the partial acknowledgment of a person who will not give everything back and also is not nothing.
I have thought about whether that is enough. I have concluded that it is what there is, and that different and enough are not always the same thing.