“No,” I said. “That’s accurate.”
“I think about the me that sent you the bookkeeping thing,” she said. “Like, I was working from the information I had, but I also just… accepted it. Your brother-in-law says his wife isn’t working, and I just took it as a given, and I should have known better. I work with people. I talk to people. I know that things are more complicated than their husbands say they are.”
I laughed. She did too.
“The thing I keep coming back to,” she said, “is that you’re really good at what you do. I saw your stuff — your profile, a couple of the case studies — and you’re genuinely good. And I just… didn’t know that. For a year and a half. Because nobody told me and I didn’t ask.”
“You know now.”
“I know now,” she agreed. “For whatever it’s worth, I think it’s pretty obvious once you actually look.”
That sentence stayed with me. It’s pretty obvious once you actually look. She meant it about my work. I thought about it in a broader way: most things are what they are, once you actually look. The obstacle is not the looking. The obstacle is whatever prevents the looking from happening.
In this case the obstacle was my husband’s story. The story is gone now. The looking is available.
## The Year, Summarized
If I had to summarize the year in the most compressed form possible, it would be this:
In January, a version of my life existed in Daniel’s family’s understanding that was not accurate. In that version, I was a woman who had left a job and had not found another one. I was the wife Daniel supported. The family worried about me in a distant and slightly condescending way that I experienced as uncomfortable and did not directly address.