He agreed to all of it, including the last part.
Thanksgiving was fine. Not transcendent — it was a holiday dinner, with the ordinary domestic comedy of a turkey that took longer than planned and the particular conversational dance of extended family who see each other infrequently and have to recalibrate to each other’s current states. Elaine was on good behavior and also, I thought, genuinely trying: she asked my sister questions and listened to the answers, which sounds like nothing but was meaningfully different from her usual mode of conversation, which tends more toward the declarative.
At one point in the afternoon, when the meal was done and everyone had moved to the living room and the day had gone loose and comfortable, I caught Nathan watching me from across the room with an expression I hadn’t seen on his face in a while. Something attentive and specific. Like a person who has remembered something they’d been in danger of forgetting.
I didn’t say anything about it. But I noted it.
## December
December arrived with the ordinary weight of December: the year’s final push of deadlines at work, the social events that accumulate without any single one being optional, the particular fatigue of a year that has had a lot in it.
Nathan and I went to our third counseling session in the first week of December. Dr. Mehta asked us to describe what had changed since we started and what remained the same.
Nathan said: the quality of our conversations has changed. He said we were having more of them, and that he was initiating more of them, and that he was trying to notice when he was making a decision that affected Olivia without asking her first and catch himself before the decision became a fact.