“Why?” I said. “If you know it was wrong, and you knew in December, and you know now — why did eighteen months pass?”
He thought about this for a long time. Long enough that I considered repeating the question.
Then he said: “Because fixing it meant admitting I’d said the wrong thing. And because once I’d said the wrong thing, every conversation where I didn’t fix it was another wrong thing, and eventually it was embarrassing to fix. The fix itself was embarrassing.”
“So you left it.”
“I left it.”
I thought about that. “Daniel. Your embarrassment about your mistake is not a reason for me to be invisible for eighteen months.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not.”
“Your family thinks I don’t work. They think you support me. One of them was worried enough about me to ask if I’d considered administrative temp work. I have a client list and a speaker directory profile and references from operations VPs. Those two pictures are not close.”
“I know they’re not.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
He said he was going to call his mother. He was going to be specific and not minimize. He was going to tell her exactly what I did and that he had given her an inaccurate picture and that the inaccuracy was his fault. He was going to do the same with Beth, separately.
“And your uncle?”
“And Richard.”
“And anyone else in your family who has heard the version where I don’t work.”