“Daniel made it sound like you were sort of at loose ends,” she said, at a certain point. Not accusatorially. Just factually.
“I know.”
“Were you ever at loose ends?”
I thought about the honest answer. “The first two months were harder than I expected. Not because the work wasn’t there, but because the shape of the day was different and I had to figure out how to work without external structure. But after that, no. I had too much to do to be at loose ends.”
“I wish I’d known,” she said. “I would have — I don’t know what I would have done differently, but I would have been paying more attention.”
“To me?”
“To what was actually true.” She picked at her sandwich. “I think I let Daniel fill in a lot of blanks that I should have been filling in myself. You’re my sister-in-law. I should have been paying more attention to you directly.”
“I wasn’t making it easy to pay attention,” I said. “I was performing the polite family dinner version and not giving anyone a lot to grab onto.”
“Why?” she asked. Not challenging, genuinely curious.
“Because I had decided it wasn’t my job to correct what Daniel had gotten wrong. And that decision turned out to be wrong.” I paused. “Both of us were avoiding something that would have been easier to deal with directly.”
“Daniel was definitely avoiding something.”
“He was. So was I, differently.” I looked at her. “I am not going to avoid things going forward. If there is something that needs to be said, I will say it. Even in your family context, which I know has its own dynamics.”