He said he needed some time. I said he had six weeks.
## What Daniel Did With the Six Weeks
He called his mother. I know because Marian mentioned it, obliquely, at a dinner in late May, a reference to “something Daniel explained” that she didn’t elaborate on. I did not press it. Whatever he had said, it had not fully corrected the picture, because Beth texted me in early June to say she’d heard I was “getting back into some work stuff” and that was great. Getting back into.
So he had started something and not finished it. He had told his mother something and his mother had told his sister something and by the time it reached Beth it had become a story about Rachel getting back into some work stuff, which was roughly twenty percent of the truth.
I texted Beth back and said: “I’ve been running my own consulting business for the past eighteen months. Full time. It’s going well.” Short and factual.
She took three hours to respond, which was not her usual response time. Then she said: “Oh. I didn’t know that. Daniel said you’d left your job.”
“I left to start the business,” I said. “There’s a difference.”
“I feel bad,” she said. “I sent you that thing about bookkeeping.”
“It’s okay. You didn’t know.”
“Is everything okay? Between you two?”
I thought about how to answer that. “We’re working on some things,” I said. “Can I call you sometime soon and actually talk?”