“Thank you,” I said.
“Daniel told me about the workshop. Yesterday. He said you were really good.”
I laughed, a little involuntarily. “He mentioned that.”
“I’d like to know more about what you do. If you’d be willing to explain it sometime.”
“Anytime,” I said. “I’m happy to.”
We talked for another fifteen minutes. It was the first real conversation I had ever had with Marian. Not the first pleasant one — we had had plenty of pleasant ones — but the first one that was about actual things.
When I hung up I sat for a moment at my desk and felt something that took me a minute to identify. It was relief, and also something that was not quite anger but was adjacent to it: the recognition of what had been possible for eighteen months that had not happened, the conversations that could have been real and were not because of a story Daniel had been too embarrassed to correct.
## Beth’s Call
Beth called two days after Marian. She had heard from Daniel first and then from Marian, and her call had a different texture from Marian’s — more uncomfortable, more apologetic, less formal.
“I feel like such an idiot,” she said. “The bookkeeping thing.”
“Forget the bookkeeping thing.”
“I’m a working parent, I know what it looks like when someone is working. I should have — I should have asked.”
“You believed your brother,” I said. “That’s reasonable.”
“It’s not, though. It’s really not. You’re my sister-in-law. I have your number. I could have called and asked how things were going instead of just assuming.”