She wrote something in her notes. Then she asked Nathan what he heard me say.
He said: “That being considered isn’t enough. She needs to be included.”
I thought that was close.
## The Photographs
Nathan had taken photographs on the trip. He showed them to me one evening about a week after he was back, not as a presentation — just scrolling through his phone while we were sitting together, the way you do when you’re idly reviewing something.
The inn was beautiful. I had seen the photographs on the website when we’d booked, but the website photographs are always the best version; the real place is usually a compromise between the ideal image and the reality of maintenance and weather and daily use. These photographs looked like the real version was actually good. Stone walls. Wide windows. A sitting room with a fireplace that someone had arranged so naturally that it didn’t look arranged.
There were photographs of Elaine. She looked, I thought, more relaxed than I usually see her — or perhaps more accurately, she looked smaller. At home she fills the space she’s in; here, in photographs taken by her son in an unfamiliar place, she looked like a sixty-three-year-old woman on a trip, neither more nor less than that.
There were no photographs of the cliff walk, which I noticed. I asked.
“We didn’t go,” Nathan said.
“Why not?”
“Mom isn’t up for that kind of thing. The path was uneven.” He paused. “I walked part of it on the last morning, on my own. While she was having breakfast. I thought about you the whole time.”