“Right,” Priya said.
“And if I go and I’m miserable, Nathan will think I’m being difficult.”
“Also right.”
“But if I don’t go, I’m –” I stopped.
“You’re what?”
“I’m changing the shape of things.”
Priya was quiet for a moment. “The shape already changed,” she said. “Nathan changed it. You’re deciding whether to pretend it didn’t.”
This is why I have been friends with Priya Shah for fifteen years.
## The Second Conversation and What It Revealed
I had thought, going into the second conversation with Nathan, that I wanted to find a solution we could both live with. What I found instead was information.
It was a Sunday afternoon, eight days before departure. I had spent the week thinking, not obsessively but thoroughly, the way I think about complex problems at work — systematically, noting dependencies, trying to understand the actual structure of what I was dealing with.
“I’ve been thinking about the trip,” I said.
Nathan looked up from his phone. He had the slightly wary expression he’d been wearing around me for most of the week. “And?”
“I want to talk about what’s actually possible here.” I sat down across from him. “If your mother comes, what does the trip look like? Walk me through it.”
He started to describe it. As he talked, I asked questions. Would Elaine be joining us for dinner every night? Probably, he said, it would feel strange to leave her eating alone. Would she be coming on the cliff walk I’d researched? Maybe not the whole thing, he thought, but perhaps part of it. Would we get mornings to ourselves? He thought she usually slept in, so probably, though he wasn’t sure.