We talked for another hour. Nathan was not unkind — he rarely is — but he was immovable. He kept circling back to Elaine’s loneliness, her grief, her isolation, as though these facts were an answer to what I was saying rather than a separate issue. Every time I tried to distinguish between his mother’s needs and the specific agreement we had made, he found a way back to the emotional reality of her situation.
I went to bed that night not yet knowing what I was going to do.
## Priya
I called Priya the next morning. We have been friends since college — the kind of friendship that runs on a low simmer most of the time and then heats up precisely when you need it to. She works in corporate communications and has a forensic ability to identify the load-bearing structures of a situation.
I told her everything. She listened without interrupting, which is unusual for her but which she does when she’s recognized that something is serious.
“Okay,” she said, when I finished. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Yes you do,” she said. “You know. You’ve known since you saw the email. You’re just waiting to see if there’s a version where you don’t have to do the hard thing.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment.
“Is there a version where you go on the trip and it’s actually fine?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it won’t be what we planned. Because his mother will require management, and I will be the one managing her while Nathan thinks that’s just how things go. Because I’ll spend four days in the place I’ve been imagining for months feeling like a third wheel on my own anniversary trip.”